The nation mourned its deadliest aviation accident in decades Thursday, a midair crash between a passenger jet and an Army helicopter that killed 67 people in Washington. President Trump blamed Democrats for enabling the tragedy with misguided diversity policies that he said put safety second.
Figure skaters, Washington area students and school employees, pipefitters and foreign nationals were among those killed Wednesday night when, officials said, the American Airlines regional carrier jet from Wichita, Kansas, collided with a Black Hawk helicopter on a routine training run during the plane’s final approach to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The jet pilot’s last transmission to the flight control tower was at 8:48 p.m.
Numerous security cameras and cellphone videos taken near the airport showed the collision and fireball, with the wreckage of both aircraft plummeting into the icy Potomac River. Massive rescue efforts soon turned into a recovery operation. Officials said there were no survivors.
By Thursday evening, at least 40 bodies had been pulled from the river. Officials said the plane carried 60 passengers and four crew members. The Army helicopter flying out of Fort Belvoir, Virginia, carried three soldiers.
The flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder from the American Airlines plane have been recovered, several outlets reported Thursday night.
The catastrophe is the deadliest domestic airplane accident since 2001, when American Airlines Flight 587 crashed into a neighborhood in Queens, New York, and killed 265 people.
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The tragedy sparked an immediate debate in Washington over the quality of the air traffic control system nationwide and the congestion of air traffic, specifically at Reagan, which has one of the busiest runways in the country. The president put himself at the center of the debate.
Mr. Trump first tried the role of comforter in chief Thursday by making an appearance in the White House press room and asking Americans for a moment of silence for the victims and their families. He said Americans were suffering during an “hour of anguish.”
“Sadly, there are no survivors,” Mr. Trump said. He called the collision a “dark and excruciating night in our nation’s capital and in our nation’s history” and vowed to make sure “nothing like this ever happens again.”
He said Democrats’ commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives put underqualified people into crucial safety jobs in the nation’s air travel system.
Mr. Trump specifically blamed former Presidents Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden for lowering air traffic hiring standards to “very mediocre at best” before he elevated them back to “extraordinary.”
“I put safety first,” Mr. Trump said. “Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen because this was the lowest level.”
SEE ALSO: Political finger-pointing ensues after a deadly aircraft collision over the Potomac River
The president said of air traffic controllers, “We want the most competent people. We don’t care what race they are. We want the most competent people, especially in those positions. You’re talking about extremely complex things, and if they don’t have a great brain, a great power of the brain, they’re not going to be very good at what they do, and bad things will happen.”
Biden administration Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg fired back at Mr. Trump in an X post.
“Despicable. 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,” Mr. Buttigieg wrote.
When pressed, Mr. Trump said he had no evidence that DEI caused the crash. He said his criticism of the previous administration’s hiring standards was “common sense.”
Mr. Trump also signed an executive action requiring a deeper review of hiring decisions in the aviation system. He appointed Christopher Rocheleau as deputy administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration.
The National Transportation Safety Board, which was involved in the crash investigation, said it had not determined a cause.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said investigators examine “the human, the machine and the environment” to determine where the fault lies. The agency said it will release a preliminary report on the incident in 30 days.
The New York Times reported that Reagan National’s air traffic control tower was understaffed during the collision. A preliminary FAA assessment by the newspaper said staffing was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic.”
D.C. Fire and EMS Chief John Donnelly said the city medical examiner’s office had taken the lead on reuniting the victims’ remains with their loved ones.
“We will continue to work to find all bodies and collect them and reunite them with their loved ones,” the chief said during an early morning briefing.
Chief Donnelly said recovery teams were scouring a debris field stretching from the crash zone near the airport downriver to the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, which connects Alexandria, Virginia, with Oxon Hill, Maryland.
Authorities had not identified the victims, but Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Michelle Reid said nine members of the school community were among those who died.
Three students and six parents were on board the flight. Two of those parents were current or former school system staff members, Ms. Reid said in a statement Thursday afternoon.
Loudoun County Public Schools Superintendent Aaron Spence also confirmed multiple victims were former students in the school system, radio station WTOP reported.
A steamfitters union based in the Washington area said four of its members died in the crash.
“We are heartbroken to confirm that four members of UA Steamfitters Local 602 were among the victims of the American Airlines Flight 5342 crash yesterday,” the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipefitting Industry of the United States and Canada said on X.
An American Airlines colleague identified the passenger jet’s pilot as Jonathan Campos, according to CNN. The network spoke with the father of Samuel Lilley, the 28-year-old co-pilot who died in the crash.
The Skating Club of Boston said 14 members of U.S. Figure Skating died in the collision, including a married pair of championship skaters turned coaches and two teenage skaters and their mothers who belonged to the club. Coaches Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov of Russia, who won a title together at the 1994 World Championships and competed at the Winter Olympics twice, died in the crash.
Airport officials said Reagan National Airport reopened at 11 a.m.
Rescue divers had battled frigid waters and high winds through the night as they investigated the murky Potomac River for any signs of victims.
Roughly 300 first responders from the U.S. Coast Guard and municipal agencies in the District, Maryland and Virginia rushed to the scene after it was first reported a plane crashed into the river.
Emergency boats and divers remained in the water Thursday as authorities continued the recovery operation and searched for the aircraft’s black boxes.
During a White House briefing, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested that human error was behind the fatal collision.
“The military does dangerous things. It does routine things on a regular basis. Tragically, last night, a mistake was made,” Mr. Hegseth said of the ill-fated Army training flight. “There was some … sort of an elevation issue that we have immediately begun investigating at the DOD and Army level.”
The defense secretary echoed a sentiment shared by Mr. Trump and newly sworn-in Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who have both said the accident was preventable.
Later Thursday, Mr. Trump questioned whether the helicopter pilots may have been responsible.
“The helicopter got in its way. I don’t know, do you blame it on the air traffic controller too, in addition to the pilots? Maybe it’s the [helicopter] pilots’ fault, they should have seen it. It was a plane that was loaded up with lights,” the president said while suggesting the helicopter should have been at a different altitude.
The FAA confirmed that the collision involved a PSA Airlines Bombardier CRJ700 regional airliner and a Sikorsky H-60 helicopter as the jet approached Runway 33 at Reagan.
Audio from air traffic controllers can be heard asking the arriving passenger jet if whether could land on Reagan National’s shorter Runway 33. The pilots confirmed they could, and controllers cleared the plane for landing.
Less than 30 seconds before the crash, an air traffic controller asked the Black Hawk helicopter whether it had the arriving plane in sight.
Moments later, the controller made another radio call to the helicopter: “PAT 25 pass behind the CRJ.” The two aircraft collided seconds later.
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 the airport.
• Matt Delaney can be reached at mdelaney@washingtontimes.com.