The divers returned to the Potomac River on Friday as part of the recovery and examination after a collision in the middle of the 67 people in the deadliest aviation disaster in the United States had killed for almost a quarter of a century.
The investigators have already restored the Cockpit language recorder and the Airlines aircraft clerk, which collided with a helicopter of the army when the aircraft landed on Wednesday evening at Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington. In the late Friday, the investigators said they had also recovered the record from the helicopter.
All on board the two aircraft were killed. Officials examined the actions of the military pilot and air traffic control after the helicopter had apparently flown to the path of the Bombardier CRJ700 Jet, which was operated by American Airlines. Officials from the several agencies involved in the investigation would not speculate about the matter on Thursday.
The authorities were still looking for the recorder of the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, Defense Minister Pete Hegseth said on Friday on the Fox News Channel. Other factors in the crash, including the height of the helicopter and the question of whether the crew used its night vision glasses, are still being examined, said Hegseth.
More than 40 corpses were pulled out of the water, the law enforcement officers from the Associated Press said. The officials were not entitled to discuss details of the investigation and to prove on the condition of anonymity.
The national examination of the schedule of the fatal collision between American Airlines Flight 5342 and a Black Hawk helicopter of the US Army on Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
HR manager examined personnel
The aircraft wore 60 passengers and four crew members, and three soldiers were on board the helicopter. A air traffic controller was responsible for the coordination of helicopter traffic and for the arrival and exit aircraft when the collision took place, as can be seen from a report by the US Federal Air Center Management, which was obtained by the Associated Press.
These tasks are often divided between two people, but the airport usually combines the roles at 9:30 p.m. as soon as traffic begins to slow down. On Wednesday, the Tower Supervisor instructed them to be combined earlier.
“The position configuration was not normal for the time of day and the traffic volume,” the report said.
The positions are regularly combined when controllers have to go away from the console for breaks, during shift changes or when air traffic is slow, said the person and spoke about the condition of anonymity to discuss internal procedures.
The FAA has long struggled with a lack of air traffic controls.
Officials said the flight conditions were clear when the jet from Wichita, Kan, arrived. A top -aviation official from the army said that the helicopter’s crew, a black falcon, was “very experienced” and familiar with the overloaded flight that occurs in the city every day.
“Both pilots had already flown this special route at night. None of them were something new,” said Jonathan Koziol, chief of staff at the Army Air. The maximum helicopter at that time was 60 meters at that time, said Koziol.
It was not immediately clear whether it crossed this limit.
The airspace around Reagan National can even question the most experienced pilots, no matter how ideal the conditions. You have to control hundreds of other trade levels, military aircraft and limited areas around sensitive locations.
A different regional jet had to go around a second chance of landing at Reagan nationally for a second chance of giving up a military helicopter near a military helicopter for a second chance of landing at Reagan.
According to aviation experts, landing at the three major airports in Washington has been a challenge for decades due to a high flight volume, limited airspace and the existence of two FL-Fly zones.
Calling data can be a lengthy process
The examinations of air crashes can take several months, and experts warn that no two probes are the same, although the flight records are not always able to give complete answers. Practically all accidents contain several factors.
There are two recorder in the civil aviation: a cockpit language recorder (CVR) for pilot’s votes or cockpit sounds and a separate flight data recorder (FDR). Some devices combine both functions.
After contact with water, they must first be dried thoroughly and the connections cleaned to ensure that the data is not accidentally deleted. Audio and data files are downloaded and copied.
The data itself means little at first. It must be decoded from raw files before converting in graphics and synchronized with other data, e.g. B. in air traffic control.
Laboratory experts sometimes use “spectral analysis”, a way to decipher fleeting noises or hardly any audible alarms.
A flood of accidents in the nineties, in which the recorder did not work more than was lost than electricity, led to the NTSB to recommend sufficient safety current to provide 10 minutes of additional admission.
The NTSB investigators restored the cockpit language recorder and the flight data recorder from the Bombardier CRJ700 aircraft, which is involved in yesterday’s mid-air collision at DCA. The recorder are in the NTSB Labs for evaluation. pic.twitter.com/ihypr0jh76
The crash on Wednesday was the deadliest in the United States since November 12, 2001 when a flight in American Airlines in a residential area of Belle Harbor, NY, shortly after the start of Kennedy Airport and all 260 people on board and five people on Killed.
The last big fatal accident with a US trade airline occurred in 2009 near Buffalo, in which everyone was killed on board the Bombardier DHC-8 propeller aircraft together with a person on site that increased the total fatalities to 50.
Experts often show that aircraft tours are mostly safe.
