DC aircraft crash newest: Flight recorder ‘black field’ from military Black Hawk helicopter recovered from wreckage

Elizabeth Anne Keys, an attorney, had traveled to Wichita on a business trip and was worried she might not be able to celebrate her 33rd birthday back in Washington with her longtime partner, David Seidman.

But her work meeting wrapped up with time to spare, allowing her to catch the flight on her birthday and make plans for the couple to get drinks late that night, Seidman said.

“She was super excited.”

Keys, a native of Cincinnati, and Seidman, from New York, met as law students at Washington’s Georgetown University. The capital became their city, and Keys was endlessly energetic as they explored it together.

She played the saxophone, oboe and bassoon in high school and was on the sailing team in college. She loved taking ski trips out West, hiking in Hawaii and entertaining friends around the fire pit at her home, her family said.

Seidman said he had never skied until she encouraged him to give it a shot. She wanted to try golf next, and they were planning to take lessons.”It was like that for everything,” he said. “She was nonstop all the time.”

The moments Grace Maxwell shared with her grandfather over the years were “his greatest joy.” And a trip home to Wichita, Kansas, allowed the 20-year-old to be by his side one final time.

Maxwell, a mechanical engineering major, was returning to college just a day after her grandfather’s funeral when she and 66 others were killed in Wednesday’s collision between an American Airlines jet and an Army helicopter over Washington, D.C.

As Maxwell’s classmates filled the pews of Cedarville University’s chapel Friday, they joined others mourning the singular lives lost and grasping to make sense of the random circumstances that put friends and loved ones in harm’s way Wednesday night.

“Can you imagine losing a parent and seven days later losing a child?” Cedarville’s president, Thomas White, said to those assembled at the university in southwestern Ohio.

Maxwell was known on campus for her devotion to helping others, working this semester on making a hand-stabilizing device to help a disabled boy feed himself and chipping in at the student radio station, the school said.

“We don’t know why a young, bright, shining star was taken from us way too soon,” White said.

The fatal midair collision on Wednesday evening between an Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines passenger jet moments away from landing at Washington, D.C.’s Reagan National Airport was a shocking and extremely rare occurrence, according to experts who believe human error is the likeliest explanation behind the tragedy that claimed dozens of lives.

Justin Rohrlich has more:

A passenger jet had to suddenly abort its landing at Reagan National Airport because of a helicopter in its flight path, just a day before an airliner and a military helicopter catastrophically collided in the same airspace, highlighting the complications of managing helicopter traffic around the busy Washington-area airport.

On Tuesday night, a Republican Airways Flight radioed air traffic controllers at Reagan they’d gotten an alert about “helicopter traffic below us,” prompting the tower to tell the twin-jet Embraer ERJ 175 jet to “go around,” The Washington Post reports.

“They had to circle back around because there was a helicopter in the flight path,” passenger Richard Hart told the paper of his experience on the flight. “At the time I found it odd. … Now I find it disturbingly tragic.”

Another flight from Charlotte into the airport had to abort for similar reasons on January 23.

Two separate recorders were recovered from the passenger plane, a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder, according the the National Transport Safety Board.

According to NTSB spokesman Todd Inman, the data recorder was “actually in what we consider good condition” and was soaked in alcohol overnight to help the data extraction process. “We have a high level of confidence that we will be able to get a full download in the very near future,” he said.

Information from the flight data recorder will not be released immediately, as investigators will have to go through and correct up to 2,000 data sets to ensure they are synchronized, Inman said.

The cockpit voice recorder had “water intrusion” after crashing into the Potomac River, which according to Inman is “not uncommon. “We deal with that all the time,” he said. “Our recorders division is one of the best in the country, in the world.”

The voice recorder was also soaked overnight in ionized water, at which point it was put into a vacuum oven in order to extract moisture. The NTSB team is still checking electric connections to determine if they’re ready to try a download.

The National Transportation Safety Board says it will only issue recommendations on changing rules once the full report on the incident is finished.

“Once this investigative report comes out, we will be advocating, probably for years, for changes that need to be made,” NTSB member Todd Inman said on Friday.

“We will not speculate on what needs to be done until we have the facts,” he said, adding that this incident “should not have happened.”

The bodies of all three service members who were on the Black Hawk helicopter have now been recovered from the wreckage, a source familiar with the recovery efforts has told CNN.