Dozens Feared Dead After Passenger Jet and US Military Helicopter Collide

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Hundreds of rescue workers continued to scour the Potomac River in dangerously cold conditions Thursday morning after a regional jet operated by an American Airlines subsidiary collided in midair with a Blackhawk military helicopter that was on a training exercise.

The plane, a Bombardier CRJ700, was carrying 60 passengers and four crew members, according to American Airlines. The jet departed from Witchita, Kansas and was approaching the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) in Washington, D.C. at the time of the collision Wednesday night. Three soldiers were in the helicopter, the U.S. Army said.

The direct flight from Witchita's Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport to Reagan National has only been offered for a year, and lawmakers have warned that the Washington, D.C. airport's operational capacity is overwhelmed.

Around 30 bodies have reportedly been recovered from the Potomac thus far, according to local news outlets, and no survivors have been found.

The circumstances of the disastrous collision will be the subject of investigations for months to come. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which is currently without an administrator, said it would probe the incident alongside the National Transportation Safety Board.

After the White House issued a statement indicating that President Donald Trump had been fully briefed on the incident, he proceeded to bloviate on social media.

"On his second day in office, as part of his careless-or-intentional destruction of the institutions that have made the United States strong and safe, Donald Trump disbanded a group called the Aviation Security Advisory Committee."

The Associated Pressreported that "a few minutes before the jet was to land, air traffic controllers asked American Airlines Flight 5342 if it could land on a shorter runway and the pilots agreed."

"Controllers cleared the jet to land and flight tracking sites showed the plane adjust its approach to the new runway," the outlet continued. "Less than 30 seconds before the crash, an air traffic controller asked a helicopter if it had the arriving plane in sight. The controller made another radio call to the helicopter moments later: 'PAT 25 pass behind the CRJ.' There was no reply. Seconds after that, the two aircraft collided."

Pete Muntean, CNN's aviation correspondent, called the collision "a tragedy that will change aviation."

The incident led some observers to more closely scrutinize recent actions by the new Trump administration, which has moved to axe the federal workforce—amid a shortage of air-traffic controllers—and enact sweeping cuts to government initiatives.

"On his second day in office, as part of his careless-or-intentional destruction of the institutions that have made the United States strong and safe, Donald Trump disbanded a group called the Aviation Security Advisory Committee," journalist and pilot James Fallows wrote Thursday. "This casually punitive gesture had the potential of undermining everything that had made U.S. aviation safety the marvel of the world. It was collaborative; it combined public, private, military, civilian, academic, and other institutions to pool knowledge; it avoided blame; but it focused relentlessly on lessons learned. You can see a list of its members here."

"Destroying this institution probably won't make a difference this week. Or this month. Or maybe even this year," Fallows added. "But in the long run, someday, it will be part of an erosion of safety—part of the thoughtless destruction of the taken-for-granted institutions that have made modern [aviation] as safe as it is. That dismantling order, one week ago, wasn't part of tonight's tragedy—whose specific origins no one knows, as I write. But unless reversed, it will be part of tragedies in the future."