New footage shows unseen angles of the fatal collision of an American Airlines passenger jet and Army helicopter.
The videos, obtained by CNN, show the moment the military Black Hawk helicopter collided with American Airlines Flight 5342 as it approached Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington, D.C., just before 9 p.m. on Wednesday.
The Bombardier CRJ700 jet, which was carrying 60 passengers and four crew members, was en route from Wichita, Kansas. Three U.S. soldiers from Bravo Company, 12th Combat Aviation Battalion, which is based at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, were aboard the helicopter. All are presumed dead.
The newly obtained footage, shot on cellphones, shows the Black Hawk helicopter collide with the plane, creating a massive fireball and causing the jet to spin, before both aircraft plunge into the Potomac River.
The new footage raised questions on social media, with some suggesting the crash wasn’t an accident.
“Pretty much looks like the Blackhawk flew directly into the plane?!?” one commenter on X, formerly Twitter, said.
“It is impossible that the helicopter pilots did not see the plane right in front of them,” another wrote.
In a post on Truth Social on Friday, President Donald Trump questioned a story published in The New York Times that claimed that the Army helicopter may have flown 100 feet higher than its approved flight path.
The helicopter involved in the fatal crash “was flying too high, by a lot,” he wrote.
“It was far above the 200-foot limit. That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it???” he added, shortly after blaming DEI policies at the FAA and air traffic control for the collision.
The Daily Beast contacted the U.S. Army and the White House for comment.
Figure skaters and coaches from the United States and Russia, a professor, and lawyers were among the 67 victims of Wednesday’s deadly crash. More than 40 bodies have been recovered so far.
The Pentagon has launched an investigation into the collision.
On Friday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told Fox News the Black Hawk chopper was training to evacuate top government officials in an emergency.
“Without getting anything into anything that’s classified, there are many things that happen in and around the Capitol that ensure in a contingency, in an emergency, our government is able to continue to operate. And what happened in this particular instance was one of those types of flights,” he said.
“I mentioned it at the press conference yesterday, a continuity of government. There are other aspects to what is done there and you need to train as you fight. You need to rehearse in ways that would reflect a real-world scenario,” Hegseth added.
