The National Transportation Safety Board has located black boxes from the American Airlines flight and the Army helicopter that collided Wednesday evening outside Washington, D.C.
NTSB board member Todd Inman announced that investigators had found two separate recorders from the American Airlines Bombardier CRJ-700 series plane and one from the Army Black Hawk Sikorsky H-60. Inman said they have a “high level of confidence” that they will be able to recover data from all of the recorders.
“I can report to you now we have recovered the Sikorsky black box. It is safely at the NTSB headquarters. It will begin an evaluation, just as the other two recorders did last night to determine when and how to take action,” Inman said.
“I can tell you from a visual inspection, we saw no exterior damage that would indicate that it was compromised at this time. So we have a high level of confidence that we will be able to have a full extraction from that as well,” he added.
Black boxes house critical flight data regarding aircraft and are designed to be resilient, with their retrieval typically a high priority after incidents, as the data can give investigators important evidence. The NTSB had announced that the first recorder from the American Airlines flight had been found on Thursday evening, with investigators now saying all flight recorders for both aircraft have been found.
Inman said air traffic controllers are being interviewed and are cooperating with the investigation. He also said the operation group has an aircraft similar to the CRJ-700, which they are using for the investigation.
“They’re ongoing tonight, they will be ongoing for probably the next few days, we’ve had full cooperation in getting the witnesses that we need to gain those interviews,” Inman said. “We will then take that information and match it with other data that we’re seeing and, if necessary, conduct follow-up interviews at a later time.”
Air traffic controllers have been under public scrutiny over the incident, which happened in the crowded airspace near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, with reports suggesting staffing at the air traffic tower at the aiport was “not normal” at the time of the deadly accident.
The wide-ranging investigation into the crash will include looking at staffing levels for the air traffic control towers, among various other potential factors, as the NTSB seeks to make recommendations to avoid a future similar incident.
“The FAA has had a very robust plan in looking at staffing. Obviously, we’ll be looking at not only staffing that day, but progressively staffing. How many people, what job functions they were doing? Were they being combined? Were they not? What was the weather outside? What was the number of landings?” Inman said.
“So we would look at changes in traffic patterns, construction at the airport, all of that. It all paints a very big picture,” he added.
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The Wednesday evening aircraft crash between American Airlines Flight 5342, arriving from Wichita, Kansas, and an Army helicopter resulted in the deaths of 67 people in the first deadly commercial airline crash in the United States since 2009.
The NTSB is expected to release a preliminary report roughly 30 days after the crash, while there is no set time frame for the final report.
