The National Transportation Safety Board has recovered the flight “black box” from the US military Black Hawk helicopter involved in Wednesday’s deadly crash with a commercial airliner, and it appears to be undamaged, NTSB member Todd Inman said Friday.
The black box – containing a flight data and cockpit voice recorder – was “in good condition” despite its accident with an American Airlines jet in Washington DC, Inman said. But, he said, the NTSB would not be releasing information from the device immediately as investigations into the crash that killed 67 people aboard both aircraft continued.
Recorders for the passenger plane were recovered Thursday night. The plane’s data recorder was “in good condition”, but the cockpit voice recorder “had water intrusion”, a problem investigators are now dealing with, Inman said.
Investigators have “a very high level of confidence” that they will get information from that device, he added.
Meanwhile, air traffic control conducted interviews with witnesses Friday, Inman said, adding those interviews would continue through Friday night and into the coming days.
Inman’s comments Friday came after Donald Trump said that the Black Hawk helicopter had been “flying too high, by a lot” at the time of the crash. The president delivered that assertion even as investigators continued to piece together the reasons for the disaster and had not arrived at a conclusion.
The president’s claim seemed to stem from questions about the angle at which the helicopter had been flying, as well as whether the air traffic control tower had been understaffed.
All 64 people on the passenger plane, along with the three people in the army helicopter, died on Wednesday night after the two aircraft collided in midair close to the Reagan National airport. The bodies of more than 40 people had been recovered from the icy Potomac River, where the wreckage now lies. Most of those recovered victims had been identified, though work was still continuing to identify others.
The US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, confirmed that the Federal Aviation Administration would immediately restrict helicopter traffic around the Reagan airport, saying the decision would ensure “the safety of airplane and helicopter traffic”.
“The American people deserve full confidence in our aviation system, and today’s action is a significant step towards restoring that,” he said.
Emergency medical helicopters as well as those actively working in law enforcement and air defense are exempt from the restrictions. The presidential helicopter Marine One is exempt, too.
There have been claims that the staffing levels in the air traffic control tower, and the congested skies around the capital, played a role in the crash.
In a highly unusual and subjective move, especially at these early stages of a painstaking official accident investigation, the US president weighed in on social media, not just to repeat his statement about the helicopter’s altitude that he made on Thursday, but with his own comments. Trump alleged that the helicopter had been flying above the required height limit in the clear night sky on Wednesday, as the commercial jet was on final approach to land at Reagan.
ABC News aired claims that the Black Hawk had been flying at 400ft, when it should have been at 200ft.
“The Blackhawk helicopter was flying too high, by a lot,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “It was far above the 200 ft limit. That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it???”
At the White House press briefing, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, backed up the president, saying he simply stated that “the helicopter was flying higher than it should have been, which is one of the reasons that led to this collision. And the other reasons for that are still being investigated.”
In the wake of the disaster, Trump has also implied, without any evidence, that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in aviation administration and air traffic control under previous Democratic administrations contributed to the crash.
“It doesn’t matter what they look like, how they speak, who they are,” Trump said on Thursday about air traffic controllers. “They have to be talented, naturally talented. Geniuses. Can’t have regular people doing their job.”
The president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, Nick Daniels, said he stood behind “every highly skilled, highly trained air traffic controller that is out there”.
In an interview with CBS News, Daniels outlined the many tests and trainings required for the job, and said: “It doesn’t matter their race, color, religion, you can know you are in the best hands that take that responsibility very seriously every day.”
Investigators have pointed out that the causes of the crash and any potential lessons from it are still to be determined. Previously, reports abounded from anonymous sources in government that double the number of air traffic controllers should have been dealing with guiding aircraft that night.
Todd Inman, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, told ABC’s Good Morning America that “we don’t have determination” yet as to whether staffing levels contributed to the crash.
“The only conclusion I know is we met with several hundred family members who lost their loved ones in the Potomac. We don’t need that to happen any more,” he said, choking up as he spoke on air.
The Illinois representative Jesús García, a Democrat who sits on the House subcommittee on aviation, accused Trump in an interview with CNN of “exploiting disaster to continue to spread racist lies and divisiveness across the country, simply to score political points with his base”.
He added: “We don’t know what occurred and whether it was human error that caused this flight or other factors.”
Maryland’s governor, Wes Moore, also a Democrat, criticized Trump’s remarks, too, including the comment Trump made when asked by the media whether he would visit the site of the crash. The president said: “You want me to go swimming?”
Moore said: “When this country needed comfort, we got chaos. When this country needed healing, we got hatred.”
An initial FAA report obtained by US media organisations said staffing levels were “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic” before a military helicopter collided with a passenger jet in the heart of Washington DC.
According to the report, the separate roles of coordinating helicopter traffic and arriving and departing planes had been combined when the collision happened, the Associated Press reported. But it further reported a source saying staffing had been normal. The Washington Post said two people had been handling the jobs of four inside the control tower.
The helicopter and the passenger plane had been flying in a “standard flight pattern” on a clear night before the crash, Duffy said.
The US army had an increase in very serious aviation incidents during the last fiscal year, with 15 flight and two ground incidents that resulted in deaths of service members, destruction of aircraft or more than $2.5m in damage to the airframe, the Associated Press reported.
