More than 30 bodies have been recovered from the scene of a crash involving a passenger jet and a US Army helicopter in Washington DC, NBC reports.
The collision occurred while the American Airlines flight was landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington, prompting a large search-and-rescue operation in the nearby Potomac River.
All take-offs and landings from the airport near Washington were halted as helicopters from law enforcement agencies across the region flew over the scene in search of survivors.
Inflatable rescue boats were launched into the Potomac River from a point near the airport along the George Washington Parkway, just north of the airport.
The black boxes from both aircraft have also been recovered.
A total of 64 people, four crew and 60 passengers, were onboard the jet with a number of young Russian ice skaters feared to be among the dead.
Passengers on the flight included ice skaters, family and coaches returning from events in Wichita, including Russian-born former world champions Yevgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov.
Three soldiers were aboard the helicopter which was on a training exercise.
President Donald Trump was briefed, his press secretary said, and Vice President JD Vance encouraged followers on the social media platform X to “say a prayer for everyone involved”.
The Federal Aviation Administration said the mid-air collision occurred around 9pm local time when a regional jet that had departed from Wichita, Kansas, crashed into a military Blackhawk helicopter while on approach to an airport runway.
Investigators will try to piece together the aircrafts’ final moments before their collision, including contact with air traffic controllers as well as a loss of altitude by the passenger jet.
American Airlines flight 5342 was inbound to Reagan National at an altitude of about 400 feet and a speed of about 140 miles per hour when it suffered a rapid loss of altitude over the Potomac River, according to data from its radio transponder.
The Canadian-made Bombardier CRJ-701 twin-engine jet was manufactured in 2004 and can be configured to carry up to 70 passengers.
A few minutes before landing, air traffic controllers asked the arriving commercial jet if it could land on the shorter Runway 33 at Reagan National and the pilots said they were able.
Controllers then cleared the plane to land on Runway 33. Flight tracking sites showed the plane adjust its approach to the new runway.
Less than 30 seconds before the crash, an air traffic controller asks the helicopter if it has the arriving plane in sight. The controller makes another radio call to the helicopter moments later: “PAT 25 pass behind the CRJ.”
Seconds after that the two aircraft collide.
The plane’s radio transponder stopped transmitting about 2,400 feet short of the runway, roughly over the middle of the river.
The tower immediately began diverting other aircraft from Reagan.
Video from an observation camera at the nearby Kennedy Centre showed two sets of lights consistent with aircraft appearing to join in a fireball.
The incident recalled the crash of an Air Florida flight that plummeted into the Potomac on January 13 1982, that killed 78 people. That crash was attributed to bad weather.
