All 67 people on board the plane and the helicopter were killed.
An American Airlines regional jet went down in the Potomac River near Washington, D.C.'s Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport after colliding with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter on Wednesday night, with no survivors.
Sixty-four people were on board the plane, which departed from Wichita, Kansas. Three soldiers were on the helicopter.
The collision happened around 9 p.m. when the PSA Airlines Bombardier CRJ700 regional jet was on approach to the airport.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem posted photos of the downed Black Hawk helicopter and said she joined the Coast Guard as they enforced a safety zone around the crash site.
"Thank you to our Coast Guard, interagency partners, and local responders," she said.
When aircraft volume goes down, a supervisor can make the decision to combine two controller positions into one position. This happens routinely, and on Wednesday at Reagan Airport, it happened 40 minutes earlier than it normally does because the supervisor determined that the traffic was low enough to combine, according to a source with direct knowledge.
This position handles local arrivals into Reagan and helicopter traffic when it’s combined.
Reagan is not understaffed, the source added.
The air traffic controllers’ union said in a statement that it's working with all federal agencies and "stands with the highly trained, highly skilled" workforce that "keeps the United States as the gold standard for aviation safety."
-ABC News’ Sam Sweeney
Dive teams are ceasing operations on the Potomac River because they have recovered all of the bodies they’re able to without moving the fuselage, two sources familiar with the operation told ABC News.
About 40 bodies have been recovered so far, including at least one of the soldiers from the Army helicopter, the sources said.
Additional bodies and human remains will need to be extracted from the wreckage once it is lifted to the surface of the river.
Crews are bracing for the possibility that some of the victims will not be recovered because of the fireball that resulted from the collision, the sources said.
-ABC News’ Katherine Faulders and Aaron Katersky
Samuel Lilley, the first officer on board American Airlines Flight 5342, recently got engaged, his sister, Tiffany Gibson, told ABC News.
"He was an amazing person. He loved people. He loved adventure. He loved traveling. He was excited. He was young. He was so young, and he was excited about life and his future and getting a dog and a house and kids. And it's just, this is just tragic," she said.
Samuel Lilley’s former brother-in-law, Greg Gibson, remembered him for his passion for flying and willingness to help others.
Samuel Lilley died on the same flight path his father, Timothy Lilley, flew for years. Timothy Lilley flew Black Hawk helicopters for the Army, transporting passengers over the Potomac River from his base in Virginia.
“We were stationed in Virginia, and [Timothy Lilley] flew that same route back and forth to the Pentagon, over and over and over again until he retired,” Tiffany Gibson said.
-ABC News’ Peter Charalambous
