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Two of three people onboard helicopter involved in crash named – report
The BBC reports that the identities of two of the three people onboard the Black Hawk helicopter involved in the Washington DC collision have been named. It added that the identity of the third person is not yet known.
According to the British public broadcaster, the pilot has been named as Andrew Eaves by his wife, Carrie.
Mississippi governor, Tate Reeves, also shared the following message on X naming Eaves:
Mississippi is mourning the loss of Brooksville native chief warrant officer 2 Andrew Eaves, who was killed in last night’s accident at Reagan airport. Elee and I are praying for the victims’ families and first responders who are assisting.”
Ryan O’Hara, 29, was the crew chief of the Black Hawk helicopter, reports the BBC, citing CBS News.
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A GE Aerospace employee was onboard the American Airlines passenger jet that collided with a and the US army Black Hawk helicopter near Washington DC on Wednesday night, the company’s CEO has said.
In a post on X yesterday, GE Aerospace CEO Larry Culp, who did not name the employee, said in a statement:
This is a tragedy not only for our industry but also for the GE Aerospace team as one of our cherished colleagues was onboard the flight.
Our hearts are with his family and all those impacted by this horrific accident.”
Here are some graphics from the Guardian’s team showing the flight paths of the American Airlines passenger jet and the US army Black Hawk helicopter:
Tilted satellite map showing height of craft as well as flight paths and collision.Tilted satellite map showing height of craft as well as flight paths and collision.Flat satellite map showing flight paths and collision.Flat satellite map showing flight paths and collision.Vector map showing flight paths and collision.Vector map showing flight paths and collision.
George Joseph
Federal lawmakers from Virginia and Maryland also issued warnings about the excessive number of aircraft flying near each other over the country’s capital.
But last year, a bipartisan body of congressional officials approved the addition of 10 additional commercial flights into DCA (the airport code of Reagan airport) over their objections.
“As we have said countless times before, DCA’s runway is already the busiest in the country,” Virginia US senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine and Maryland’s senator Chris Van Hollen and then senator Ben Cardin, all Democrats, said in a joint statement months before the law was passed. “Forcing the airport to cram additional flights in its already crowded schedule will further strain its resources at a time when air traffic controllers are overburdened and exhausted, working 10-hour days, six days a week.”
The group of lawmakers filed an amendment to the proposal to block the increased flights into Reagan, but the original bill passed that May despite their protests.
The bill, Texas senator Ted Cruz said at the time, “ultimately gives the FAA the stability it needs to fulfil its primary mission – advancing aviation safety – while also making travel more convenient and accessible”.
Weeks after the bill passed, the lawmakers’ fears were nearly proven. Air traffic controllers cancelled the takeoff of one American Airlines plane speeding down a runway just before another plane attempted to land on an intersecting airstrip.
In a statement after Wednesday’s fatal crash, Maj Gen Trevor Bredenkamp, a commander in the army Capital Region, said its investigation is ongoing and will be conducted in conjunction with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Transportation Safety Board.
US president Donald Trump suggested that efforts to increase diversity at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) could have been a cause in the crash. At a White House press conference on Thursday, he harshly criticised Pete Buttigieg, who headed the transportation department under president Joe Biden, saying, “he’s a disaster … He’s run it right into the ground with his diversity.”
Buttigieg criticised Trump on social media, calling his comments “despicable”, reports Reuters.
“As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying. We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew air traffic control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch,” Buttigieg said.
Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, also criticised Trump’s comments. “It’s one thing for internet pundits to spew off conspiracies, it’s another for the President of the United States to throw out idle speculation as bodies are still being recovered,” Schumer said.
Former aides to Buttigieg say the diversity policy cited by Trump had been a longstanding policy and was in effect during Trump’s first term. Buttigieg could not immediately be reached for comment, reports Reuters.
“I am not blaming the controller,” Trump added. He said he did not know if diversity was to blame but vowed to investigate. “So we don’t know, but we do know that you had two planes at the same level. You had a helicopter and a plane. That shouldn’t have happened.”
US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, said late on Thursday he will soon announce a plan to reform the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) after a devastating collision between an American Airlines regional plane and an army helicopter killed 67 people.
“I am in the process of developing an initial plan to fix the @FAANews. I hope to put it out very shortly,” Duffy said on X.
President Donald Trump who has harshly criticised diversity efforts at the FAA, directed an immediate assessment of aviation safety on Thursday, reports Reuters.
Earlier, Trump said he had appointed a former senior aviation official as the acting head of the FAA – just one day after the deadliest US air disaster in more than 20 years.
Chris Rocheleau, a US air force veteran who worked at the FAA for more than 20 years, was previously chief operating officer of the Business Aviation Association. Reuters reports that sources said Liam McKenna, who was the counsel to the Senate commerce committee, has also been named chief counsel at the FAA. Rocheleau has been at the FAA since last week, the sources added.
Mike Whitaker, unanimously confirmed as the FAA administrator in October 2023, stepped down early from his five-year term on 20 January when Trump took office and for 10 days the FAA declined to say who was running the agency on an acting basis. Trump has not yet named a permanent candidate to replace Whitaker.
The FAA is about 3,000 controllers behind staffing targets and the agency said in 2023 it had 10,700 certified controllers, about the same as a year earlier, Reuters reports.
As well as dealing with the aftermath of the Washington crash, Rocheleau will face key questions in his new role, including when to allow Boeing to boost production of the 737 Max after a mid-air emergency in January 2024.
George Joseph
Lawmakers and citizens have previously raised concerns about the crowded skies over the greater Washington DC area.
Last year, Bill Johnson, a commercially certified pilot and a retired US army explosives expert, saw more than 20 UH-60 army helicopters fly over his house in one hour as he was working outside in his vegetable garden in Annandale, a residential community in Virginia’s Washington DC suburbs.
At first Johnson was bothered by the noise. But, as he kept noticing the thrum of military training flights overhead, he began to fear that the increasing congestion in the skies could result in disaster.
Johnson sent letters to military leaders at nearby Fort Belvoir, where the Black Hawk Sikorsky involved in Wednesday’s collision was based and flew from that night, and the Department of Defence. He sent a complaint to his congressperson and even to the Federal Aviation Administration warning them about the dangers of too many low-altitude army training helicopters soaring through the area.
“On 3/29/2024 at 1503 hours I observed two US army UH-60s nearly collide over 1-495 near Annandale,” he wrote in one complaint to the FAA from last March, noting they passed each other above the highway only “about 50-100 meters apart”.
That April, Johnson forwarded another complaint to the US Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, raising similar concerns.
“Given that these are everyday training flights over known congested areas,” he said, referring to a nearby antenna, how precisely “does the military guarantee the safety of persons and property on the ground?”
No one answered his question, he told the Guardian on Thursday.
“We lost more than 60 people, and two aircraft, and we shut down a major airport, and it was completely avoidable,” he said.
“There’s so many places they could have been doing training. Why did they have to do it at the end of the runways of DCA?” Johnson continued, referring to the airport code of Reagan airport.
Alarms were raised about ‘congested’ airspace before fatal Washington crash
George Joseph
Reporting by George Joseph and Joanna Walters.
After Wednesday’s fatal crash which took down a commercial jet and a military helicopter on a training flight at Washington DC’s Reagan airport, public officials and aviation experts are resurfacing concerns about how uniquely congested the airspace is around the country’s capital.
As of Thursday night, authorities have said all 64 people on the American Airlines flight were presumed dead as well as three more on the army helicopter, making the incident the deadliest US air tragedy since 2001.
On Thursday, during his confirmation hearing before the Senate armed services committee, Daniel Driscoll, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of the army, questioned why military helicopters need to conduct training exercises near such a busy commercial airport.
Driscoll told lawmakers that the incident seemed “preventable” and vowed to review army practices.
“There are appropriate times to take risk and inappropriate times to take risk,” he noted. “I think we need to look at where is an appropriate time to take training risk, and it may not be at an airport like Reagan.”
The US military has provided little information on its helicopter training activities near the capital and did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Martin Chalk, a former British Airways captain who retired in 2020, posited that military pilots might need to train in this particular area to prepare for transporting senior political and military figures to and from the area, which is close to the Pentagon as well as the White House, Capitol Hill and other buildings at the heart of the federal government.
DC airports - Reagan is closest to the centre of Washington DC.DC airports - Reagan is closest to the centre of Washington DC.“The military tend to have a bit of a law-unto-themselves approach,” he said, explaining that military pilots do not have to follow all civil aviation protocols.
He emphasised that it is not clear yet exactly what happened but he suggested that investigators could ask questions about the exchanges between the aircraft and the tower.
Anna Betts
Among the confirmed victims of the American Airlines jet carrying 64 people that collided in midair with an army Black Hawk helicopter carrying three soldiers were young figure skaters returning from the US figure skating championships, along with their parents and coaches, and a North Carolina-based flight attendant.
The Skating Club of Boston said in a statement on Thursday that Jinna Han and Spencer Lane, along with their parents Jin Han and Christine Lane and coaches Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov were aboard the plane on Wednesday night.
The group was returning from the US figure skating national development camp, a program for “young competitive skaters of tomorrow”, following last week’s US championships in Wichita, Kansas.
“Our sport and this club have suffered a horrible loss with this tragedy,” said Doug Zeghibe, the CEO and director of the Skating Club of Boston.
Skating is a tight-knit community where parents and kids come together six or seven days a week to train and work together. Everyone is like family. We are devastated and completely at a loss for words.”
The most recent post on Lane’s Instagram profile was a photograph from the inside of a plane on a runway, with the caption “ICT -> DCA” – the codes for Wichita Dwight D Eisenhower airport and Ronald Reagan Washington airport in Washington DC.
Lane was reportedly 16 years old, and from Barrington, Rhode Island, according to Reuters.
What does the NTSB do and how will the investigation work?
Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) chair, Jennifer Hommendy, described the investigation into the crash on Wednesday night as an “all-hands-on-deck event” for the agency during a news conference on Thursday in which she appeared with members of the board and a senior investigator overseeing the investigation.
The Associated Press (AP) have put together this useful explainer on what the NTSB are and what they do:
What does the agency do?
The NTSB is an independent federal agency responsible for investigating all civil aviation accidents as well as serious incidents in the US involving other modes of transportation, such as train disasters and major accidents involving motor vehicles, marine vessels, pipelines and even commercial space operators.
“We’re here to ensure the American people that we are going to leave no stone unturned in this investigation,” Hommendy said, noting the investigation is in the very early stages. “We are going to conduct a thorough investigation of this entire tragedy, looking at the facts.”
The agency has five board members who serve five-year terms and are nominated by the president and confirmed by the US Senate.
How will the investigation work?
For the investigation into Wednesday’s crash, the NTSB will establish several different working groups, each responsible for investigating different areas connected to the accident, board member Todd Inman said.
Inman said those groups include operations, which will examine flight history and crewmember duties; structures, which will document airframe wreckage and the accident scene; power plants, which will focus on aircraft engines and engine accessories; systems, which will study the electrical, hydraulic and pneumatic components of the two aircraft; air traffic control, which will review flight track surveillance information, including radar, and controller-pilot communications; survival factors, which will analyse the injuries to the crew and passengers and crash and rescue efforts; and a helicopter group.
The investigation also will include a human-performance group that will be a part of the operations, air traffic control and helicopter groups and will study the crew performance and any factors that could be involved such as human error, including fatigue, medications, medical histories, training and workload, Inman said.
How long will the investigation take?
NTSB officials did not say on Thursday how long the investigation would take, but accident investigations often take between one and two years to complete.
The agency typically releases a preliminary report within a few weeks of the accident that includes a synopsis of information collected at the scene.
What we know on day two
A regional passenger jet from Wichita, Kansas collided with a military helicopter approaching Ronald Reagan airport near Washington DC late on Wednesday, killing all 64 people onboard the plane and three soldiers in the helicopter. Here’s what we know a day after the crash:
Investigators have recovered the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder from American Eagle flight 5342, an American Airlines flight operated by PSA, the Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced late on Thursday. The recorders are now at the NTSB’s labs for evaluation. Board member Todd Inman said officials aimed to release a preliminary report into the incident within 30 days.
At least 27 bodies have been recovered from the plane and one from the Black Hawk helicopter which crashed into the Potomac River. The Bombardier CRJ-700 jet broke into three parts and was in waist-deep water in the Potomac. More than 300 emergency workers, including divers, weathered high winds and packed ice to retrieve pieces of the plane and bodies.
As many as 14 skaters and coaches, including two 16-year-olds and a married pair of world champions, were onboard the American Airlines plane. The Skating Club of Boston said Jinna Han and Spencer Lane, both aged 16, were on the plane. The club also said the Russian-born ice skating coaches and former world champions Yevgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, who were husband and wife, were onboard. Other victims included ice-skating coach Alexandr Kirsanov, and two of his young students Angela Yang and Sean Kay.
Two Chinese citizens were also on the plane, state media reported citing the Chinese embassy. Senator Maria Cantwell said that the dead on the plane also included citizens from Russia, the Philippines and Germany.
The pilot and first officer on the American Airlines flight were named as Jonathan Campos and Sam Lilley in media reports. Campos was 34 and Lilley 28, it was reported.
President Donald Trump has been strongly criticised by Democrats after suggesting that the previous administration’s diversity policies were responsible for the crash. In a press conference, Trump told reporters, “We had the highest standard [of air traffic controllers in his first administration] 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.
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader, said Trump had used the collision to “peddle lies, conspiracy theories, and attack people of color and women without any basis whatsoever”. He continued: “Have you no decency? Have you no respect for the families whose lives have been turned upside down?”
Journalists also highlighted another exchange between the president and journalists. Trump responded to a question about whether he was going to visit the scene of the plane crash by saying: “What’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?”
Trump later signed another executive order that officials said would stop “woke policies” in federal aviation. Trump had already signed an executive order ending diversity initiatives at the Federal Aviation Administration last week.
Conflicting reports have emerged about whether staffing levels at Ronald Reagan national airport were “not normal”. According to an initial Federal Aviation Administration report, obtained by the New York Times, the Associated Press and others, staffing levels were “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic”. According to the report, one air traffic controller was responsible for coordinating helicopter traffic and arriving and departing planes when the collision happened, the Associated Press reported, and that configuration was described as “not normal”.
But a person familiar with the matter told the Associated Press that staffing at the air traffic control tower on Wednesday night was, in fact, at a normal level. The positions are regularly combined when controllers need to step away from the console for breaks or are in the process of a shift change, or air traffic is slow, the person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal procedures.
Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, said the Pentagon had launched an investigation. He added that the army helicopter crew involved in the collision was “fairly experienced”. Describing the flight as an “annual proficiency training flight”, Hegseth said: “They did have night vision goggles.”
Both the helicopter and the passenger plane had been flying in a “standard flight pattern” on a clear night before the crash, transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, said. He added that it was not uncommon for military aircraft to be seen in the skies over the nation’s capital, including near Reagan , which is located in Arlington, Virginia.
The American Airlines CEO, Robert Eisen, said: “At this time we don’t know why the military aircraft came into the path of the PSA aircraft.” He urged friends and family of those affected to call 1-800-679-8215, which is the helpline the airline has set up.
A day before Wednesday night’s midair collision near Reagan airport, a different jet there had to abort its landing and make a second approach after a helicopter appeared near its flight path, the Washington Post reported.
The US army saw an increase in very serious aviation incidents during the last fiscal year, with 15 flight and two ground incidents that resulted in deaths of service members, destruction of aircraft, or more than $2.5m in damage to the airframe, the Associated Press reported.
Senator Maria Cantwell, the top Democrat on the Senate commerce committee, questioned the safety of military and commercial flights separated by as little as 350 feet (107 m) vertically and horizontally, reports Reuters.
She also urged the government to reconsider allowing so many helicopter flights next to such a busy airport.
