Responders recall a mission of recovery and grief a year after the midair collision near DC
Jan 29, 2026, 5:49 AM
WASHINGTON (AP) — For some, it was the children’s luggage and small ice skates that became indelible memories of the night a passenger plane and a helicopter collided over the murky Potomac River. Others remember boats navigating debris and shallow water to bring victims’ bodies ashore. And there was the suddenness: people seconds from landing, gone.
Families of those on board American Airlines Flight 5342 and an Army Black Hawk helicopter are marking Thursday as the one-year anniversary of the deadliest plane crash on U.S. soil in more than 20 years. Another group is reliving that night and the days, weeks and months that followed: the emergency responders who dove repeatedly into the river with nearly zero visibility, braving cold water, jet fuel and jagged wreckage in the hope of rescuing survivors.
But there were no miracles, just the bodies of daughters, sons, wives, husbands, mothers and fathers to pull from the water, identify and return to their families.
Sixty-four passengers and crew of the airliner traveling from Wichita, Kansas, to Washington were moments from touchdown when the plane collided with the Black Hawk helicopter and its crew of three. All 67 died in the crash on Jan. 29, 2025.
“We knew at the one-hour mark there weren’t going to be any survivors,” said the District of Columbia’s Fire and EMS chief, John Donnelly. The priority became recovering the bodies and the personal belongings and returning them to their families while gathering evidence for crash investigators.
Over nearly a week, divers and other emergency personnel recovered all of the victims from about 8 feet (2.5 meters) of water and undertook the painstaking task of identification. Others spent months scouring the river for personal effects.
“If you’ve ever been out on the Potomac, it’s not a pleasant place to dive under the best conditions,” said Tim Lilley, whose son Sam, 28, was the co-pilot of the American flight. “But on that night, the fact that they’re getting in the water and doing everything that they could was amazing.”
Tim Lilley, a former Black Hawk pilot, said that later in the spring, first responders took him and his wife, Sheri, out on the river so they could lay flowers at the places where the two aircraft came to rest.
“We were able to talk to the actual person that helped pull my son out of the water. It was a huge emotional experience, and it was so healing.”
The first call — “crash crash crash” — came from the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport control tower at 8:48 p.m.
That and subsequent alerts triggered the region’s largest emergency response since hijackers flew a plane into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. By midnight, about 350 responders from dozens of agencies were on scene, including 20 to 30 divers from harbor patrol units.
“The first time you hear it, like anything else, your stomach drops,” said Metropolitan Police Department scuba diver Robert Varga, a 16-year member of the department who was at home when the call came and was in the water within the hour. “We know it’s going to be a serious scene if they’re going to call us.”
The last major crash on the Potomac had been in January 1982, when an Air Florida flight clipped a bridge on takeoff and plunged into the river, killing 78.
“It was total chaos,” said Washington fire rescue squad Lt. Sam Short who, along with two divers from his team, were among the first on the scene. He said he witnessed gruesome sights.
“There’s a lot of different things that we saw and did that night. You just can’t describe it to people,” he said.
When the responders arrived at the frozen river, the plane’s fuselage was partially submerged and suitcases and other possessions were strewn about. The heavy smell of jet fuel wafted in the air.
Police officer and diver Jeffrey Leslie was getting his elementary school-age kids to bed when he got a text.
On a visit to the area last week, Leslie navigated one of the unit’s boats to the crash site almost on instinct as planes took off and landed in the background. He steered to the end of Runway 33, where Flight 5342 was supposed to land but instead became one of the areas where they brought victims.
Leslie, who spent hours at the crash site last year and returned multiple times over the following months, said his memory of that night can be triggered by cold weather and sometimes by the white ice skates in his daughter’s closet. Young figure skaters returning from a meet were among the plane’s passengers.
Donnelly, the fire chief, said his priorities were the families, the investigation and the safety of the responders who were braving dangerous temperatures and jet fuel.
His emotions hit him when he met with families hoping for some positive news, to give them updates on the recovery efforts. “Then it becomes very personal and you can feel other people’s grief and pain,” he said.
A memorial in Washington on Wednesday honored the families and the responders. Some family members attending a National Transportation Safety Board hearing on the crash this week wore shirts with the names of responder units.
Lt. Andrew Horos, the harbor master for district’s police department, said mental health is tantamount for the responders. “You can’t really prepare your members or anyone for that,” he said.
Edward Kelly, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, said the union sent 12 peer support personnel to the city in the aftermath and they met with 75% of the firefighters and paramedics who responded to the crash. One goal was “to let them know what to look for in themselves, how to see if traumatic stress is manifested in them and where to go if they need help,” he said.
That is particularly important in an incident involving so many children, he said. “A lot of those people that respond, firefighters, the paramedics, the police officers, a lot us are parents. We have young kids.”
“It’s been a struggle,” said the rescue squad’s Short, who also responded to the 2001 attack on the Pentagon and lost a close colleague days before the crash. “A couple of our guys have been out numerous months over the last year because of this.”
Donnelly said the department also is monitoring the divers’ health because of hazardous materials they may have encountered.
Leslie, the police diver, said recovering earrings, wedding bands and children’s skates and returning them to the grieving families provided a therapy of sorts.
“They appreciated every single thing we could get back,” Horos said.
Varga, the scuba diver, said if he could say anything to the families it would be that emergency personnel did their best to save, then return the passengers to their families.
“And then in the months after that, we were out there as often as we could trying to recover personal effects for the families, because each thing that we did find, we knew was important to the family members,” he said.
“We hope that we were able to provide just a sliver of closure to them.”
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Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska.
