No survivors from crash
All passengers and crew on both aircraft are feared dead, Trump said Thursday morning. Dozens of bodies have been recovered from the Potomac River, and the operation has become a major recovery effort.
The flight carried from both the U.S. and Russia who were traveling back from a competition in Wichita.
Doug Zeghibe, CEO of The Skating Club of Boston, said 14 skaters returning home from the national development camp in Wichita, Kansas, were killed in the crash.
Of those, six were from The Skating Club of Boston — two coaches, two teenage athletes and the athletes’ mothers. as athlete Jinna Han; Jinna’s mother, Jin Han; athlete Spencer Lane; Spencer’s mother, Christine Lane; and coaches Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shishkova.
Two Russian world champions were also among the passengers on the American Eagle flight, Russian state media reported.
By Thursday morning, officials said that at least two dozen bodies had been pulled from the water. Of those, 27 were from the American Eagle civilian jet and one from the U.S. Black Hawk helicopter, officials said.
Boats and ambulances were transporting human remains to a temporary morgue, and the D.C. medical examiner said the recovery operation is the largest undertaken it had taken in decades.
The investigation into the crash
The National Transportation Safety Board is . The Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Army will also be involved in the investigation.
The investigation will involve collecting evidence from the scene and reviewing radio traffic and data on aircraft flight paths. It will also involve communicating with air traffic controllers and interviewing them. The process can take a year or longer.
The NTSB said its investigators recovered the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, and the black boxes are at a lab for evaluation.
Weather and communication did not appear to be issues when the crash occurred Wednesday night, as skies were clear and pilots were in communication with air traffic control.
Two aviation experts also told NBC News that there was no evidence pointing to missteps by the pilots.
Experts expect dialogue with air traffic control to be one of the main focal points of the investigation.
Both the plane and the helicopter were being flown by experienced pilots who had “standard communication” with air traffic control when they crashed, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told reporters.
At the time of the crash, there was one controller in the air traffic control tower focused on both helicopters and airplanes, a source with knowledge of the situation told NBC News. Usually, the tower has a separate controller who deals exclusively with choppers. FAA guidelines allow for the combined position.
