WASHINGTON: Operations to salvage the wreckage from a deadly collision between a US Army helicopter and a passenger jet continued Sunday as rescuers said 55 victims had so far been identified.
Dozens of victims have been pulled from the icy Potomac River, and rescuers voiced confidence that those remaining would be retrieved in the massive operation to recover the plane that collided in midair with a Black Hawk military helicopter.
Washington fire chief John Donnelly said human remains of some of the 67 people killed in the crash had been found as efforts were made to lift the fuselage of the plane, adding that they were taken to the medical examiner.
“Tomorrow there’ll be some lifting operations on the wreckage that’s in the water,“ he told a briefing Sunday.
“So far, 55 victims have been positively identified…from this this accident,“ he added.
Some 200 vessels were involved with the recovery and salvage efforts, the Coast Guard said.
“We will absolutely stay here and search until such point as we have everybody,“ Donnelly said.
‘Staffing shortages’
The airliner was coming in to land at Reagan National Airport — just a few miles from the White House — when it collided with a US Army helicopter on a training mission on Wednesday night.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is expected to compile a preliminary report within 30 days, although a full investigation could take a year.
As the investigation searches for answers, aviation experts have homed in on whether the helicopter crew could see through military night-vision goggles and whether the Reagan National Airport control tower was understaffed.
US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Sunday that staffing shortages had long been a problem for air traffic control, vowing to improve the situation.
“Staffing shortages for air traffic control has been a major problem for years and years,“ he said on Fox News Sunday, where he promised to ensure “bright, smart, brilliant people in towers controlling airspace.”
President Donald Trump has repeatedly tied the causes of the crash and staffing shortages to diversity, equity and inclusion policies, attributing them without evidence and before the formal crash investigation has concluded.
“This is not saying that the person who was at the controls is a DEI hire… first of all, we should investigate everything. But let’s just say the person at the controls didn’t have enough staffing around him or her, because we were turning people away because of DEI reasons,“ Vice President JD Vance said in an interview on Fox Business.
The Washington disaster, among the most deadly in decades, was followed closely by the crash of a medical plane into a busy Philadelphia neighborhood, killing a young Mexican girl aboard, her mother, the crew, as well as a bystander on the ground Friday.
The girl had been in the US for life-saving medical care and was on her way back to Mexico, according to the hospital that treated her and the company that operated the medical flight.
On Sunday, a United Airlines flight from Houston to New York was evacuated after an engine ran into difficulty before takeoff, the Federal Aviation Administration reported.
Fire crews were scrambled and nobody was injured, the Houston Fire Department said.
