Officers have positively recognized 55 of the 67 folks killed in Wednesday’s midair collision between an American Airways passenger jet and a navy helicopter over the Potomac River in Washington, DC.
“It’s my belief that we’re going to recover everyone,” Hearth Chief John Donnelly mentioned on Sunday at a press convention.
“We have some work to do as the salvage operation goes on.”
On Monday, the Military Corps of Engineers will start lifting the wreckage from the river, which officers have mentioned may take per week or longer.
“We have a wide debris field,” mentioned Colonel Francis Pera of the US Military Corps of Engineers.
“Within that wide debris field, we’re employing different techniques to make sure we can understand what’s in the water.”
Work will likely be halted as stays are found throughout removing operations, officers added.
Earlier on Sunday, relations of the 67 folks killed arrived on the fringe of the river close to the crash website on buses.
Wreckage is being moved to a hangar at Washington Reagan Nationwide Airport.
A lot of the Potomac River stays restricted to approved vessels.
Two of the lesser-used runways on the airport stay closed.
Investigators from the Nationwide Transportation Security Board mentioned Saturday they’d decided the CRJ-700 airplane was at 325 toes, plus or minus 25 toes, on the time of affect.
The knowledge was based mostly on knowledge recovered from the jet’s flight knowledge recorder – the “black box” that tracks the plane’s actions, velocity and different parameters.
The brand new element suggests the Military helicopter was flying above 200 toes, the utmost altitude for the route it was utilizing.
Information confirms the air visitors controller alerted the helicopter to the presence of the CRJ-700 about two minutes earlier than the crash.
One second earlier than affect, the American flight crew had a “verbal reaction,” based on the airplane’s cockpit voice recorder, and flight knowledge reveals the airplane’s nostril started to rise, officers mentioned.
