Officers mentioned Sunday solely a dozen victims are left to be recovered from the Potomac River following final week’s lethal midair collision involving an Military helicopter and a business jet close to Ronald Reagan Washington Nationwide Airport.
D.C. Hearth and EMS Chief John Donnelly mentioned 55 victims have been pulled from the water and recognized after the our bodies had been discovered throughout surveys performed earlier than eradicating the aircraft’s fuselage.
Officers mentioned salvage boats will start lifting the aircraft’s wreckage out of the river Monday morning.
A complete of 67 individuals — 64 contained in the American Airways jet coming from Wichita, Kansas, and three troopers aboard the Black Hawk helicopter — had been all killed when the 2 plane crashed into one another Wednesday evening.
The collision was the worst home aviation accident in virtually a quarter-century.
Chief Donnelly has maintained the final remaining victims are inside or across the doomed jet’s fuselage, and the restoration shall be full as soon as it’s extracted from the water.
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“If we knew the place they had been, we might have already got them out,” the chief mentioned to again his hunch the victims are nonetheless encased within the wreckage. “We now have some work to do because the salvage operation goes on, and we are going to completely keep right here and search till such a degree as we have now all people.”
Chief Donnelly mentioned he didn’t meet with the households earlier Sunday, who had been at Reagan Nationwide for a personal ceremony that morning.
“These individuals have suffered a horrible loss, and, , they’re grieving, and I feel that that’s precisely what you’d count on,” the chief mentioned. “There’s a complete vary of feelings in that. I’ll say that they’re a powerful group of households which are targeted on getting their family members again.”
