A member of the American figure skating team shared a photo from a doomed American Airlines plane shortly before crashing in Washington DC.
Spencer Lane, 26, uploaded the photo around 7 p.m. and Wednesday, which seemed to show the radiant taxiing on the catwalk on Wichita Airport in Kansas before it left for the last flight.
He subtited the ICT -> DCA – the codes for Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
Other members of the American figure skating team were also on board the plane. They returned to the DC area after attending a national development camp for young skaters in Kansas.
Russian figure skaters Yevgenia Skhiskhkova and Vadim Naumov are also supposed to have been on the plane.
Their team USA Figure Skater Son Maxim 23, was in the Wichita camp, although it is unclear whether he was also on the fateful flight.
Flight 5342, with 64 people on board, bumped into a Black Hawk helicopter of the US Army when it made his last approach to Reagan Airport after 9 p.m.
Spencer Lane, 26, shared this photo from the plane of the doomed American Airlines when it left Wichita Airport in Kansas on Wednesday evening
Spencer Lane is depicted on stage during an earlier tournament. He was aboard the American Airlines plane that crashed in the Potomac River in Washington DC, killing at least 30
It split into two and dived into the icy Potomac River.
Until now, more than 30 bodies have been removed from the ice -cold water with the death toll that is expected to rise considerably.
The Black Hawk was on a training sort, in which experts wondered why he flew to the American Airlines American Eagle Jet.
The crash took place in some of the most tightly controlled and guarded airspace in the world, just over 3 miles south of the White House and the American Capitol.
Less than 30 seconds before the crash, an air traffic controller asked a helicopter if it had the upcoming aircraft in sight. Moments later, the controller led a radio call to the helicopter: “Pat 25 pass behind the CRJ.”
There was no answer. Seconds afterwards the two aircraft collided.
The radio transponder of the aircraft stopped broadcasting approximately 2,400 feet short from the runway, roughly over the center of the Potomac.
Authorities carry out a huge search and rescue operation.
Inflatable boats were launched in the river and First Responders put light towers off the coast to illuminate the area. Helicopters of law enforcement agencies in the region also flew over the stage in a methodical search for bodies and survivors.
Fatal crashes from commercial planes in the US have become a rarity. The latter was in 2009 near Buffalo, New York. All 45 passengers and the four crew members were killed when the Bombardier DHC-8 propoper plane crashed against a house. One person on the ground was also killed.
The incident remembered the crash of an Air Florida flight on Wednesday that fell in the Potomac on January 13, 1982 and killed 78 people. That crash was attributed to bad weather.
