The bodies of 41 people have been recovered and 28 had been positively identified.
The Army on Jan. 31 has released the names of two of the three soldiers killed in the collision with an American Airlines jet near Ronald Reagan National Airport.
Family members have asked to keep the identity of a third soldier private at this time.
Response teams have recovered the body of the flight’s crew chief, Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O’Hara. The bodies of Chief Warrant Officer Andrew Lloyd Eaves, and of the anonymous third soldier, have not yet been recovered.
Jonathan Koziol, Army Aviation Directorate chief of staff, told reporters on Jan. 30 that the soldiers were conducting flight training at the time of the crash.
The instructor was an experienced pilot with over 1,000 hours of flight time, Koziol said.
The black box from the Army Black Hawk helicopter that collided with a commercial jetliner and crashed into the Potomac River has been recovered, investigators announced on Friday. They are reviewing that flight data recorder along with two recovered earlier from the passenger jet.
No one survived the Wednesday night collision. John Donnelly, chief of Fire and Emergency Medical Services for Washington, said on Jan. 31 that the recovery crew had located the remains of 41 passengers, and had identified 28 of them. He said next of kin notifications had been made to 18 families, and he expects all the remains to be recovered.
The American Airlines jet was carrying 60 passengers and four crew members. The helicopter had three soldiers on board.
Although Ronald Reagan National Airport reopened, two of its three runways remained closed to keep aircraft from flying over the crash scene, said Terry Liercke, the airport’s vice president and manager. Roughly 100 flights were canceled Friday.
The Federal Aviation Administration also heavily restricted helicopter traffic around the airport, the Department of Transportation said in a statement, hours after President Donald Trump said in a social media post that the Army Black Hawk had been flying higher than allowed.
Investigators have recovered the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder of the American Airlines jetliner, which collided with the helicopter as the plane was coming in for a landing at the airport, which is just across the Potomac from Washington.
