Washington air crash: Crews lift first pieces of plane wreck out of Potomac River
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A crane removing airplane wreckage from the Potomac River, on Feb 3.
PHOTO: AFP
WASHINGTON - The US Army Corps of Engineers on Feb 3 began lifting pieces of a crashed passenger airliner from the Potomac River in Washington, including the first of two engines, along with a large section of the fuselage.
The American Airlines regional passenger jet and a US Army helicopter had collided over the Potomac River on the evening of Jan 29, killing 67 people.
The salvage team on Feb 3 recovered part of the fuselage and right engine of the Bombardier CRJ-700 passenger jet and will retrieve the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk after the airplane has been recovered.
Work has begun to remove a wing out of the water, which officials have said would take several days or longer. They hope to remove the cockpit on Feb 5.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said on Feb 3 that it has completed interviews with air traffic controllers in its investigation. It said it has obtained training and flight logs for both flight crews and maintenance records for both aircraft and is building histories for both flight crews.
Additional radar data will be released on Feb 4 as investigators work to complete a more precise picture of what happened, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy told Reuters.
“We have much more granular data from Potomac TRACON that we’re going to be able to release,” she said, referring to a Federal Aviation Administration terminal radar approach facility in Virginia.
The Washington DC fire department said on Feb 2 that officials had identified 55 of the 67 people killed in the collision. Additional human remains have been recovered but not identified, the department said on Feb 3. Those and additional remains are still in the process of being identified by the medical examiner’s office.
Wreckage is being moved to Hangar 7 at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Much of the Potomac River remains restricted to authorised vessels. Two of the lesser-used runways at the airport remain closed.
Ms Homendy said the NTSB also plans to look at prior near-miss incidents between helicopters and airplanes around Washington Reagan and could expand the investigation “to other areas where there’s military helicopter and air traffic”.
She said the NTSB is also conducting interviews with American Airlines and the US Army.
“We’re going to have to understand what are standard operating procedures” for a helicopter training mission, she said.
Investigators from the NTSB said on Feb 1 they had determined that the CRJ-700 airplane that had departed Wichita, Kansas, was at 325 feet (99 metres), plus or minus 25 feet, at the time of impact.
The detail suggests that the Army Black Hawk helicopter was flying above 200 feet (61m), the maximum altitude for the route it was using.
Ms Homendy said that data was from DC radar which updates every five seconds, and “that can change in a quick period of time when the helicopter is moving at a good speed”.
Data confirmed that the air traffic controller alerted the helicopter to the presence of the CRJ-700 about 2 minutes before the collision.
Meanwhile, relatives of some of the victims visited the edge of the river near the crash site on Feb 3. REUTERS
