The skies on Wednesday night were clear. The pilots were in communication with air traffic control, and officials said American Eagle Flight 5342 was on a standard descent to the runway in the busy airspace above the nation’s capital. Yet somehow, the passenger jet and an Army helicopter collided midair, bursting into flames and plunging into the Potomac River in the first major fatal commercial plane crash in the United States in 16 years.
Federal investigators are now searching for answers in what is expected to be a lengthy process. A number of factors, both technological and human-driven, could he played a role in the deadly accident, iation experts say, including whether multilayered systems designed to stop collisions functioned properly.
“Everything, unfortunately, lined up for this accident to happen,” said Kenneth Byrnes, a pilot and chairman of the flight training department at Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University.
The National Transportation Safety Board is leading the investigation, which will also involve the Federal Aviation Administration and the Army. The painstaking process will include the collection of evidence from the scene, reviews of radio traffic and data on aircraft flight paths, communications with air traffic controllers and interviews with those controllers. Such investigations can take a year or longer to reach a conclusion, and the NTSB is the only agency authorized to provide an official cause for the crash.
“We look at the human, the machine and the environment,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy told reporters Thursday. “We will look at all the humans that were involved in this accident. We will look at the aircraft. We will look at the helicopter. We will look at the environment in which they were operating in. That is standard.”
Officials cautioned that it is still too early to speculate about what led to the crash that killed all 64 on board the American Eagle jet and all three crew members on the Army Black Hawk helicopter.
Emergency response teams assess airplane wreckage in the Potomac River near Ronald Reagan Washington Airport on Wednesday night.Andrew Harnik / Getty ImagesAviation experts say that the focus for investigators will likely be on several elements, including an automated system that should he warned the plane’s pilot that another aircraft was close by; the pilots’ communications with air traffic controllers; and any visual obstructions that could he prevented the pilots from seeing each other. They will also investigate any missteps by the pilots, though two iation experts told NBC News that there was nothing pointing in that direction.
The disaster — the first major fatal commercial plane crash in the United States since 2009 — happened just before 9 p.m. ET Wednesday as the American Eagle jet, a regional aircraft owned by American Airlines, was descending into Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, where airline pilots routinely nigate tight and crowded airspace.
While commercial jets he a safety system called the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System, or TCAS, that gives pilots verbal cues when they are in danger of colliding with another aircraft, most military helicopters are not equipped with the same technology, said Jimmie Cummings, a spokesperson for the Army Combat Readiness Center. He said the chopper in the crash did not he it.
Regardless, there are limitations to TCAS. One is that the system reduces the number of alerts it issues as a plane descends in order to oid false alarms from other aircraft on the ground. The American Eagle’s last recorded altitude was at 375 feet, according to the aircraft tracking website FlightAware.