00:00Just two days before the one-year mark, the National Transportation Safety Board put the failures behind flight 5342 on the record Tuesday, and it was blunt.
00:13This crash had warning signs, and it was preventable.
00:15At Tuesday's hearing, investigators walked through the final minutes before the American Airlines regional jet, coming from Wichita, Kansas, and an Army Blackhawk helicopter collided near Reagan National, killing 67 people.
00:28The NTSB chair, Jennifer Homendy, zeroed in on what she called a stunning safety gap in the airspace.
00:35How is it that no one, absolutely no one, in the FAA did the work to figure out there was only 75 feet, at best, 75 feet of vertical separation between a helicopter on Route 4 and an airplane landing on Runway 33?
00:58The hearing also laid out missed opportunities in the tower that night, including a controller working both airplane traffic and helicopter traffic, and investigators saying a conflict alert triggered just seconds before impact.
01:12However, flight 5342 was never warned about the helicopter.
01:16Homendy also pushed a point the NTSB has made for years.
01:20The technology exists to reduce this risk, but the FAA has not required it.
01:25She said a relatively inexpensive GPS-based system, known as ADS-BN, could have given crews nearly a full minute of warning before the collision.
01:36Then there was what happened after the crash, in the water.
01:39Responders described arriving at the Potomac River and realizing early on the plane carried children, some of them figure skaters, returning home after a national competition.
01:49So, very early on, when the crash occurred, and especially when we were on the scene, we realized there was a lot of children on that airplane.
01:57It was the number one goal for, I think, both us and FAA and everyone recovering was the dignity and the quick recovery of the victims.
02:05Dive teams returned for days, then for weeks and months, searching the river bottom for anything they could give to the grieving families.
02:14We returned for days and weeks and months afterwards to comb the bottom of the Potomac River to get anything we could back for the families.
02:21Personal effects were super important to us. Each one felt like a treasure.
02:27Some things that stick out in my mind is a male wedding ring that I found on the bottom.
02:31I know we found a number of ice skates.
02:34The NTSB's final report is expected in the weeks ahead, but the message from Tuesday was clear.
02:40The risk was known, the fixes were available, and 67 people still died.
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