Summary

An American Airlines regional jet carrying 64 people collided midair with a Sikorsky H-60 military helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Wednesday night.

The PSA Airlines Bombardier CRJ700 was on approach from Wichita when the crash occurred around 9 p.m. ET. At least one aircraft ended up in the Potomac River, prompting a major emergency response.

The FAA closed the airport, and the NTSB is leading the investigation.

  • P00ptart@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    This happens right after trump disbands the aviation safety advisory committee. This feels familiar…

    • TheRealKuni@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      Honestly this crash has been coming for a while. We’ve had so many near-misses in the US on or near runways lately. ATC is understaffed and overstressed. It was just a matter of time.

      (Though from what I can tell ATC did their job here, this seems like it was a mistake by the training crew on the Blackhawk. But we’ll have to wait for the final report to know for sure.)

  • fuzzywombat@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    This is terrible tragedy. It’s been few hours since the accident and no words on survivors so it’s looking grim. NTSB has lot of work to do to figure out what happened so it won’t happen again.

    Edit: Just watching the press conference at 1am and they won’t talk about survivors or fatalities. It’s a bad sign.

    2nd Edit: blancolirio video Juan Browne does excellent analysis on aircraft incidents.

    3rd Edit: 2nd blancolirio video This update is tough to watch.

    • Mac@mander.xyz
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      44 minutes ago

      Cliffs notes:

      Plane coming in to land
      Tower requests runway change
      Helicopter flying a dedicated path near the airport
      Heli path has max altitude of 200ft
      Tower asks for visual confirmation from heli of plane (fairly late)
      Heli confirms, requests visual separation (meaning heli will handle separation of aircraft visually)
      (Note: Multiple of same plane coming in to land)
      Heli reaches 300ft alt a few seconds before plane arrival
      Plane coming in to land also approaching 300ft
      Contact

      YTer suspects heli pilots confirmed visual of the wrong plane due to multiple Bluestreak planes coming in for landing.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      The Potomac is not a gentle river. Even if people survived to get into the water it would be very difficult to survive. And the water is freezing too.

      • rjc@lemmy.worldM
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        32 minutes ago

        17.48 you can hear the audible gasp from ATC (or someone on the air) at the moment if impact.

    • goldteeth@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      17 hours ago

      Shiiiiiit. I was looking out my window around quarter to nine and saw a weird bright orange spot off towards DC. Didn’t think anything of it in the moment; I’m right under a flight path, not too far from a military airfield, all sorts of weird lights flying over all the time. But looking at that footage that’s exactly what it looked like. Christ.

    • FirstCircle@lemmy.ml
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      23 hours ago

      Wow, that’s just awful, after seeing the vid I can’t imagine there are any survivors. RIP to all.

  • wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
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    24 hours ago

    Holy shit that is awful

    I’m so sorry to the families of everyone involved, that is a huge tragedy.

    • TheRealKuni@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      As I understand it’s a pretty common route for military helicopters. Lots of bigwigs in DC who get transported by the military from place to place. This was a training flight, so no VIPs being transported by the Blackhawk. Just three crew members.

      The job of the helicopters on that route is to avoid aircraft visually, which isn’t easy at night. They were told by ATC to maintain visual of the CRJ and pass behind it, and the helicopter said they had visual, but must have been mistaken.