WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Data retrieved from an American Airlines regional passenger jet and a U.S. Army helicopter that collided last week in Washington over the Potomac River killing 67 people will be released on Monday, National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy said in an interview on Fox News.
“We are not ruling out any information or any issue. We’re taking in everything we can and not really focused in any particular area in order to collect everything we need to evaluate this particular accident,” Homendy said.
The Army Corps of Engineers on Monday began lifting the wreckage from the river, which officials have said could take a week or longer.
Wreckage is being moved to a hangar at Washington Reagan National Airport. Much of the Potomac River remains restricted to authorized vessels. Two of the lesser-used runways at the airport remain closed.
Investigators from the NTSB said on Saturday that they had determined that the CRJ-700 airplane was at 325 feet (99 meters), plus or minus 25 feet, at the time of impact.
The new detail suggests that the Army Black Hawk helicopter was flying above 200 feet (61 meters), the maximum altitude for the route it was using.
“With respect to the helicopter, it’s important to understand that DC radar picked up that it was at 200 feet, but that radar doesn’t update again and for a full five seconds,” Homendy said.
Homendy said the NTSB was working to get “better, more granular information to understand the altitude.”
Data confirmed that the air traffic controller alerted the helicopter to the presence of the CRJ-700 about two minutes before the crash.
The Washington, D.C., fire department said on Sunday that officials had positively identified 55 of the 67 people killed in the collision.
Meanwhile, relatives of some of the victims visited the edge of the river near the crash site on Sunday.
(Reporting by Jasper Ward and David Shepardson; Editing by Susan Heavey and Mark Porter)
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