Investigators recovered the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder from the plane involved in Wednesday night’s mid-air collision with a US military helicopter that killed all 67 people onboard both aircraft.
The recorders are currently at the National Transportation Safety Board labs for analysis, the agency said on Thursday evening, and are expected to shed light on exactly what went wrong. Preliminary reports raised questions over whether understaffing in an air traffic control tower at the Washington DC airport played a role in the United States’ worst aviation disaster in years.
As it approached Reagan National airport around 9pm, American Eagle flight 5342 collided with a US army Black Hawk helicopter, plunging wreckage of the two aircraft into the icy Potomac River and killing all 64 passengers and crew on the plane, along with three soldiers on the helicopter.
It was the first fatal commercial airline crash in the US since 2009, and was quickly described by Donald Trump and his top transportation officials as “preventable”, even as accident investigators cautioned that they had no answer yet as to what caused the tragedy.
But a preliminary investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration found that staffing at the airport’s control tower was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic”, according to the New York Times. The airport is one of three serving Washington DC, and like many airports nationwide has struggled to properly staff its control tower.
The understaffing reportedly led to a single controller handling both arrivals and departures at the airport and also managing helicopter traffic – a job usually handled by two people.
A day before the collision, another jet trying to land at Reagan airport was forced to make a second approach due to a helicopter near its flight path, the Washington Post reported, citing an air traffic control audio recording.
The crash was the first national tragedy to strike since Trump was inaugurated last week, and at a White House press conference, the new president oscillated between consoling the nation and seizing on the deaths for political gain.
“This was a dark and excruciating night in our nation’s capital and in our nation’s history, and a tragedy of terrible proportions,” Trump said. “As one nation, we grieve for every precious soul that has been taken from us so suddenly.”
Satellite imagery showing flight paths and collisionHe then argued that changes made under Joe Biden to requirements for hiring air traffic controllers may have been a factor in the accident.
“We had the highest standard that you could have, and then they changed it back – that was Biden,” Trump said, adding that he believed the changes were made as part of diversity programs that his administration was vowed to repeal. The president also singled out the policies of Pete Buttigieg, a rising Democratic star who served as transportation secretary under Biden, saying that “he’s just got a good line of bullshit”.
Asked to provide proof of his assertions about air traffic controller hiring, Trump declined, saying that he had reached the conclusion “because I have common sense, okay. And, unfortunately, a lot of people don’t.”
Later, Trump signed an executive order on aviation safety that rolls back diversity initiatives and repeated claims without evidence that those initiatives contributed to Wednesday’s crash.
Buttigieg responded to Trump’s comments by saying, “As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying,” and said the Biden administration had put safety first.
The crash is being investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board, whose chair, Jennifer Homendy, described it as “an all-hands-on-deck event”. Board member Todd Inman said officials aimed to release a preliminary report into the incident within 30 days.
The agency has begun collecting wreckage, including portions of the helicopter, and is storing it at a hangar at the airport. Washington’s fire and emergency department said its divers had searched all accessible areas and would conduct additional searches to locate aircraft components on Friday.
Over the course of the day, Trump administration officials revealed more details of how the helicopter and passenger plane might have crossed paths. The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said the helicopter involved carried “a fairly experienced crew” based at Fort Belvoir in Virginia that was conducting a “required annual night evaluation”. They had been equipped with night-vision goggles, he added.
“It’s a tragedy, a horrible loss of life,” Hegseth said.
Police comb for debris and remains from the crash on Thursday. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPAAt the Potomac River, which separates Washington DC from Virginia, more than 300 emergency workers, including divers, weathered high winds and packed ice to retrieve pieces of the plane and bodies.
The Bombardier CRJ-700 jet operated by regional carrier PSA Airlines broke into three parts and was in waist-deep water in the Potomac, US transportation secretary Sean Duffy said.
He noted that both the helicopter and the passenger plane had been flying in a “standard flight pattern” on a clear night before the crash, and that it was not uncommon for military aircraft to be seen in the skies over the nation’s capital, including near Reagan National, which is located in Arlington, Virginia.
Washington DC’s fire chief, John Donnelly, said the wreckage from the aircraft had been spread out by the wind but that he was confident rescuers could recover all those onboard. Of those found so far, 27 were from the plane and one from the helicopter.
“We will continue to work to find all the bodies to reunite them with their loved ones,” Donnelly said. “I’m confident that we will do that. It will take us a little bit of time. It may involve some more equipment.”
Several of the victims had been in Wichita, Kansas, where the flight began, for a development camp hosted by US Figure Skating, according to the Skating Club of Boston, which released the names of its six skaters, coaches and family members who had been onboard the jet.
“Our sport and this club have suffered a horrible loss with this tragedy,” the CEO and executive director, Doug Zeghibe, said on Instagram. “We are devastated and completely at a loss for words.”
People sit at Ronald Reagan National airport in the aftermath of the crash on Thursday. Photograph: Eduardo Muñoz/ReutersCiting Russia’s state-run Tass news agency, Reuters reported that two world champion figure skaters from the country, Yevgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, also had been onboard the plane.
Muriel Bowser, Washington’s mayor, said that the passengers on the plane had included “families from our region, Kansas and across the country. We share a profound sense of grief.”
Reagan National airport closed immediately after the incident, but flights resumed later on Thursday. A helpline for family and friends of those potentially affected was set up by American Airlines and can be reached at 800-679-8215.