The remains of all 67 victims of last week’s mid-air collision of an American Airlines flight and a US army helicopter near Washington DC have been recovered, authorities said on Tuesday.
The chief medical examiner is still trying to positively identify one set of remains, officials said.
The news came as crews tried to recover the cockpit and other parts of the plane from the Potomac River.
Officials said their work might depend upon the wind and tidal conditions in the river, where the aircraft crashed last Wednesday after colliding as the plane was about to land at nearby Ronald Reagan National Airport.
All 67 people on board the two aircraft were killed.
A piece of wreckage is lifted from the water on to a salvage vessel (Ben Curtis/AP)
By midday, crews were working to raise another large piece of the plane. The National Transportation Safety Board said it did not plan to provide further updates from the scene.
Authorities said early on in the effort that they expected to recover the remains of everyone who died.
They are focusing first on the plane and hope to recover the Black Hawk helicopter later this week.
Officials said salvage crews on Monday were able to pull one of the two jet engines from the river, along with large pieces of the plane’s exterior.
They were also working to recover a wing of the plane, which had flown out of Wichita, Kansas.
Sixty passengers and four crew were on the American Airlines flight, including figure skaters returning from the 2025 US Figure Skating Championships in Wichita. The Black Hawk was on a training mission with three people on board.
Federal investigators are trying to piece together the events that led to the collision. Full investigations typically take a year or more, but investigators hope to have a preliminary report within 30 days.
Wednesday’s crash was the deadliest in the US since November 12, 2001, when a plane crashed into a New York City neighbourhood just after takeoff, killing all 260 people on board and five on the ground.