Heartbreaking audio clips have been released that reveal the chilling words “crash, crash, crash, this is an alert three” in the air traffic control (ATC) room as a nightmare unfolded in the skies over Washington.
On Wednesday evening, 67 people lost their lives after an American Airlines passenger plane collided with a military Black Hawk helicopter as the commercial jet descended to land at Washington DC’s Ronald Reagan airport at around 9pm local time.
A massive fireball was recorded as the two aircraft struck one another just 400 feet above the icy water of the Potomac River, into which the wreckage of the larger plane plummeted.
A massive rescue operation was launched, but it’s thought no one could have survived the crash.
The Black Hawk Sikorsky H-60 helicopter was marked as PAT 25 on radar images for ATC, who were in contact with the military crew just seconds before the deadly incident. The passenger aircraft, a Bombardier CRJ700, was referred to as CRJ.
Recordings from the tower have now emerged, with one controller saying to the helicopter “PAT 2-5 do you have the CRJ in sight?”, before adding: “Pat 2-5 pass behind the CRJ.”
Seconds later a chilling gasp can be heard on the airwaves from the control tower, and another aircraft can be heard radioing in: “Tower, did you see that?”. In the background another person is recorded as issuing an alert, saying: “Crash, crash, crash, this is an alert three.”
The crash is the United States’ most deadly aviation incident since 2001, and shockwaves and grief have spread across the nation and the world.
Disturbing CCTV and video footage has also emerged, which appears to capture the moment the smaller helicopter and passenger plane strike one another before bursting into flames.
Authorities have recovered 28 bodies from the crash site, with victims known to have included renowned figure skaters, a young pilot, and a lawyer reportedly travelling home on her birthday.
The Bombardier plane was carrying competitors from an ice skating show in Wichita, Kansas, and six skaters have been linked to a club in Boston. The BBC reports they were two teenagers, their mothers, and two Russian coaches, Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, former world champions in their sport.
The plane carried 60 passengers and four crew members, and three soldiers were aboard the helicopter. President Donald Trump told a White House news conference that no one survived.
The crash occurred before 9pm in some of the world’s most tightly controlled and monitored airspace, just over 3 miles (about 4.8 kilometers) south of the White House and the Capitol.
Air crash investigations can take months, and federal investigators told reporters they would not speculate on the cause.
National Transportation Safety Board investigators recovered the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder from the Bombardier CRJ700 airplane, agency spokesperson Peter Knudson said. They were at the agency’s labs for evaluation.
The plane was found upside-down in three sections in waist-deep water, and first responders were searching miles of the Potomac.
The helicopter wreckage was also found. Images from the river showed boats around the partly submerged wing and the mangled wreckage of the plane’s fuselage.
American Airlines CEO Robert Isom said the plane was making a normal approach when “the military aircraft came into the path” of the jet.
