The Army on Jan. 31 has released the names of two of the three soldiers killed in the collision with an American Airlines jet near Ronald Reagan National Airport.
Family members have asked to keep the identity of a third soldier private at this time.
Response teams have recovered the body of the flight’s crew chief, Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O’Hara. The bodies of Chief Warrant Officer Andrew Lloyd Eaves, and of the anonymous third soldier, have not yet been recovered.
Jonathan Koziol, Army Aviation Directorate chief of staff, told reporters on Jan. 30 that the soldiers were conducting flight training at the time of the crash.
The instructor was an experienced pilot with over 1,000 hours of flight time, Koziol said.
The black box from the Army Black Hawk helicopter that collided with a commercial jetliner and crashed into the Potomac River has been recovered, investigators announced on Friday. They are reviewing that flight data recorder along with two recovered earlier from the passenger jet.
No one survived the Wednesday night collision. John Donnelly, chief of Fire and Emergency Medical Services for Washington, said on Jan. 31 that the recovery crew had located the remains of 41 passengers, and had identified 28 of them. He said next of kin notifications had been made to 18 families, and he expects all the remains to be recovered.
The American Airlines jet was carrying 60 passengers and four crew members. The helicopter had three soldiers on board.
Although Ronald Reagan National Airport reopened, two of its three runways remained closed to keep aircraft from flying over the crash scene, said Terry Liercke, the airport’s vice president and manager. Roughly 100 flights were canceled Friday.
The Federal Aviation Administration also heavily restricted helicopter traffic around the airport, the Department of Transportation said in a statement, hours after President Donald Trump said in a social media post that the Army Black Hawk had been flying higher than allowed.
Investigators have recovered the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder of the American Airlines jetliner, which collided with the helicopter as the plane was coming in for a landing at the airport, which is just across the Potomac from Washington.
The flight data recorder was in good condition and its information was expected to be downloaded shortly, National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) member Todd Inman told reporters. He said water entered the cockpit voice recorder, and while that’s not unusual, it adds to investigators’ work.
The helicopter’s data, contained in a single black box, was at NTSB headquarters and appeared to be undamaged, Inman said.
The Associated Press also reported Thursday that preliminary findings by the Federal Aviation Administration showed that staffing at the air traffic control tower was “not normal,” and that one employee may have been trying to do the work of two people.
Inman said the crash was so abrupt that there was no evidence of emergency safety equipment being deployed before the plane hit the water. The NTSB is expected to release a report with its preliminary findings within 30 days.
Authorities have confirmed that the jet was carrying members of the professional figure skating community, including the 1994 pairs world champions from Russia, Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov.
Donnelly said recovery teams would need to free the plane’s wreckage, which is submerged in the riverbed, before they would be able to access the rest of the passengers’ remains.
Trump told reporters at the Oval Office on Jan. 30 that he intends to meet with the victims’ families and declined to give further details.
