An American Airlines jet carrying 60 passengers and four crew members collided with an Army helicopter while landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington, prompting a large search-and-rescue operation in the nearby Potomac River. There were multiple fatalities, according to a person familiar with the matter, but the precise number of victims was unclear as rescue crews hunted for any survivors. Three soldiers were onboard the helicopter, an Army official said. There was no immediate word on the cause of the Wednesday collision, but all takeoffs and landings from the airport were halted as dive teams scoured the site and helicopters from law enforcement agencies across the region flew over the scene in a methodical search for bodies. Images from the river showed boats around the partly submerged wing and what appeared to be the mangled wreckage of the plane’s fuselage. “We are going to recover our fellow citizens,” District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser said at a somber news conference at the airport in which she declined to say how many bodies had been recovered. The person who told The Associated Press that there had been multiple deaths was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity. Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas said, “When one person dies it’s a tragedy, but when many, many, many people die it’s an unbearable sorrow.” President Donald Trump said he had been “fully briefed on this terrible accident” and, referring to the passengers, added, “May God Bless their souls.” Passengers on the flight included a group of figure skaters, their coaches and family members who were returning from a development camp that followed the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Wichita. “We are devastated by this unspeakable tragedy and hold the victims’ families closely in our hearts,” U.S. Figure Skating said in a statement. Two of those coaches were identified by the Kremlin as Russian figure skaters Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, who won the pairs title at the 1994 world championships and competed twice in the Olympics. The Skating Club of Boston lists them as coaches and their son, Maxim Naumov, is a competitive figure skater for the U.S. The Federal Aviation Administration said the midair crash occurred before 9 p.m. EST when a regional jet that had departed from Wichita, Kansas, collided with a military helicopter on a training flight while on approach to an airport runway. It occurred in some of the most tightly controlled and monitored airspace in the world, just over three miles south of the White House and the Capitol. Investigators will try to piece together the aircrafts’ final moments before their collision, including contact with air traffic controllers as well as a loss of altitude by the passenger jet. American Airlines Flight 5342 was inbound to Reagan National at an altitude of about 400 feet and a speed of about 140 miles per hour when it suffered a rapid loss of altitude over the Potomac River, according to data from its radio transponder. The Canadian-made Bombardier CRJ-701 twin-engine jet, manufactured in 2004, can be configured to carry up to 70 passengers. A few minutes before landing, air traffic controllers asked the arriving commercial jet if it could land on the shorter Runway 33 at Reagan National and the pilots […]