In seconds, the wreckage of each aircraft plunged into the icy Potomac River, the victims with it. All perished โ men, women and children, among them about 20 young figure skaters and their coaches who had taken part in a national championship competition in Wichita. They account for nearly a third of the dead.
Why did it happen?
Aviation officials, military officers, political leaders and public-safety authorities, wearing stunned expressions at news briefings in the sleepless hours afterward, promised answers: Investigations will be conducted. Hearings will be held. Lessons will be learned.
They seemed buoyed only by this: Rescuers had mobilised swiftly and braved the winter elements, the cold and wind and darkness out on the river, many working through the night and into the morning.
Their task was grim, more so than many of them had ever experienced, performed as heartbreak sank in from DC to Kansas.
โAt this point, we donโt believe there are any survivors,โ the Districtโs fire chief, John A. Donnelly snr, told reporters Thursday in the early light. As of 7.30am, the confirmed dead numbered 27 from the jetliner and one from the Black Hawk, a figure that has since climbed to 41, the fire department said Friday. โWe will continue to work to find all the bodies,โ Donnelly vowed. โWe are searching every square inch of space.โ
The sky along the Potomac poses some of the most complex challenges in the country for pilots.
They must rely on layers of procedures and electronic safeguards to avoid calamity. Military helicopters fly low over the river, sharing National Airportโs heavily used takeoff and landing routes with commercial planes. Congestion in the air and on runways and taxiways has long worried aviation analysts and others. National was built for 15 million passengers annually; it now handles 25 million.
Year after year these travellers safely got where they were going, until the night they didnโt.
At the time of the collision, staffing levels were โnot normalโ inside Nationalโs control tower, with no single controller dedicated to managing helicopter traffic, according to an air traffic safety report described to the Washington Post. It was not immediately clear who or what was responsible for the wreck.
โTower, did you see that?โ a pilot asked in a recorded transmission as the fireball ignited above the Potomac.
โFire command, the accident occurred in the river,โ said another voice, sounding calm. โBoth the helicopter and the plane crashed in the river.โ
Ari Schulman, a journalist in DC, was driving home to Alexandria, Virginia, on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, near the airport, when he saw the conflagration above.
He said he saw sparks trailing a jetliner at low altitude as the aircraft banked sharply right.
โI couldnโt make sense of what I saw because it didnโt seem like they were coming directly out of the plane,โ Schulman said. โThey were underneath its belly and separated a little distance.โ
He said late Wednesday, โI pray that there are many survivors,โ but there were none.
Courtney Cain, 28, said she was at home at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in Southeast DC, across the Potomac from the airport, when she heard a thunderous boom.
Peering through a living room window, she saw flames in the sky, which at first she thought she was imagining. Then she walked to the riverfront and beheld a nightmare.
โIโm honestly still shaking,โ Cain said much later.
Her 5-year-old son told her, โIโm worried about the people.โ
In the Buzzard Point section of Southwest Washington, where the waters of the Anacostia and Potomac rivers meet, not far from the airport, Abadi Ismail was getting ready for bed shortly before 9 p.m. when he heard a โbang-bangโ that sounded to him like something from โa war zone,โ he told the Reuters news agency.
โI looked at the sky,โ Ismail, 38, said, and โall I could see at that moment was smoke.โ
โItโs horrific.โ
At 8.48pm, an urgent announcement went out from National Airportโs control tower.
โCrash, crash, crash. This is an alert 3. Crash, crash, crash.โ
Alert 3: The highest alert, broadcast directly to the radios of DC police officers and firefighters assigned to a nearby marine unit.
As hundreds of emergency personnel from all over the metropolitan area converged on National and its surrounding roadways, bridges and riverbanks, a sea of strobe lights bathed the evening in red and blue for miles around.
Dispatchers summoned more and more help as the scope of the disaster became clear. Soon more than 300 first responders were at the scene or en route from as far as Baltimore, so many that not enough boats were available for all the rescuers arriving to look for survivors and bodies in the frigid river.
The Army sent people. So did the Coast Guard, the FBI, Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, the Maryland and Virginia state police, the Maryland Transportation Authority. So did suburban police and fire departments.
A DC police officer and a fire department colleague saw a dinner-cruise yacht at a pier with its lights on, said David Hoagland, president of the DC firefighters association, who was briefed on what happened next. They ran to the pier and banged on the heavy steel gates.
โWe need to get on your boat,โ one of them said.
The boat, with room for 150 passengers, had just docked after a river cruise. A janitor unlocked the gates of the pier. The first responders hurriedly told the captain and crew that 60 or more people had been aboard the two doomed aircraft and that some or most of them, alive or not, were out there in the water.
They needed help.
Ten minutes later, the yacht was a mile and a half upriver in the area where the wreckage had plummeted down. The debris field stretched for seven miles along the Potomac, south from the airport to the Woodrow Wilson Bridge.
โA large black spot,โ as one official described it. Hazardous ice chunks littered the murky water, and wind gusts buffeted the rescuers like frozen needles.
Remnants of the helicopter were upside down in the river, as was the fuselage of the jetliner, broken into three pieces, officials said. It was a Bombardier CRJ700, operated by a subsidiary of American Airlines, designed for up to 78 passengers.
Hoping survivors would be found and brought aboard, the yacht crew lined up chairs and turned tablecloth linens into blankets covering the decks. A chef, without being asked, cooked chicken.
Others in the crew brewed coffee and handed off the pots to smaller boats carrying divers who emerged from the water exhausted and covered in aviation fuel. The pungent odour of the fuel hung so thick in the air that some divers vomited.
They pulled mangled remains and body parts from the water. Blood pooled on the deck of a fireboat. For some of the rescuers, the carnage was worse than any they had seen before.
Then some made their way to the yacht, where they rested on decks and benches and perched on an upholstered chair meant for smiling brides on wedding excursions, said Chad Barth, a vice president of City Cruises, the boatโs owner.
Morgue tents sprung up along a bank of the Anacostia.
Some of the dead were transported to a National Airport facility; some were carried ashore to the DC police departmentโs helicopter base near the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, where the DC fire departmentโs medical director, physician David Vitberg, waited with a city medical examiner.
One by one on the pier in the cold the victims were formally pronounced deceased.
Then the rescuers who had delivered the remains turned in their boats and went back on the river to search for more, over and over beyond the Thursday dawn.
โOur first responders are resilient,โ said Donnelly, the fire chief. โBut, yes, this call will be hard for them.โ
At last the sun edged down on a long Thursday.
โThe investigation and recovery efforts remain active and our divers have searched all areas that are accessible,โ the fire department said on social media. On Friday, divers will work with the National Transportation Safety Board โto conduct additional searches to locate aircraft components, to support the investigation, and begin operations to salvage the aircraft.โ
Many bodies were still out there, and so were many responders.
Many loved ones still waited for news they know is coming.
The rituals began: Mourners left flowers at a memorial in Ashburn, Virginia, honouring members of the Ashburn Ice House skating community who died in the crash. US President Donald Trump said he planned to speak with families of some of the victims.
Asked by reporters whether he would visit the crash site, he said: โWhatโs the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?โ
Elsewhere the living took stock.
โI fly enough and know the statistics enough not to be afraid today,โ said Jared Kathcart, 37, who was boarding a flight home to Kansas City after a business trip to DC. โIf I personalise this, itโs not through fear for myself, but by feeling sympathy for the families of the victims and what they are going through.โ