Pentagon probes crash by 'experienced' Black Hawk crew, halts flights

An FAA employee I know confirms agency already lacks sufficient air traffic controllers,

he wrote

Everybody wants to speculate as to how did this happen, why this happened. Whose fault is that? Is it the helicopter? Was it the airplane?"

Nehls said

We have to find out the reason for the crash and then come up with, you know, recommendations to make sure it doesn’t happen again,

he said

We are going to wait for all the information to come in from, from this vantage point, but to back up what the president said, what I've seen so far, do I think this was preventable? Absolutely,

Duffy said

I don't want to go into too much detail about the information we have from the FAA. but obviously it is not standard to have aircraft collide,

said Duffy

This was a clear night last night; the helicopter was in the standard pattern. If you live in the DC area, you will see helicopters up and down the river,

Duffy said during a news conference

Whether it was air traffic control, whether it was military aircraft, helicopters or the American flight, everything was standard in the lead up to the crash ... Something happened here,

Duffy continued

We are now at a point where we're switching from a rescue operation to a recovery operation. At this point, we don't believe there are any survivors from this accident,

said Donnelly in a Thursday morning news conference

The American Airline flight coming in to land was in a standard flight pattern as it was coming into DCA, so this was not unusual with a military aircraft flying the river and aircraft landing at DCA,

he continued

We call these missions that are flown in the D.C. area as our pilots are getting hours and experience training missions,

Duffy said