This winter has unfortunately been the season of plane disasters. We have had multiple plane crashes in the US recently. They include the Washington DC plane crash, the United Airlines engine fire at Houston's George W. Bush Airport, and a recent crash in Philadelphia.
American Eagle Flight 5324 operated by PSA Airlines with a CRJ-700, carrying 60 passengers and 4 crew members from Wichita’s Dwight D. Eisenhower Airport in Kansas was going to land at Washington D.C. 's Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. While approaching runway 33, an Army Black Hawk Sikorsky helicopter collided with the airplane which carried 3 military members in midair. The helicopter was on a training mission and was part of the B Company, 12th Aviation Battalion out of Fort Belvoir in Virginia, according to Joint Task Force-National Capitol Region media chief Heather Chairez. This created a fire show in the sky and the flight crashed into the Potomac River. One of the plane's two engines was seen being lifted from the river Monday morning, and a large section of the fuselage was taken out of the water around midday. There are a few potential reasons why the plane crash occurred. One of them is the fact that there was only one person working in the control tower, when there should have been two. According to an article in the New York Times, the tower's staffing was "not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic." While the crash remains under investigation, audio recordings of air traffic control were released online, conveying the shock that personnel felt when they witnessed the crash.
Following this incident, there were two more plane disasters in Philadelphia and at George W. Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.
This United Airlines Flight 1382, on an Airbus A319, had 104 passengers and five crew members and was set to travel to New York’s LaGuardia Airport at around 8:30 am. However, while on the runway, the plane’s engine caught fire, prompting an emergency evacuation. Over a hundred passengers and crew members evacuated the flight on that Sunday morning due to a "reported engine issue," according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The issue was detected prior to takeoff, and no one seemed to be injured.
Later in Philadelphia, in a medical jet which carried a child that had just been treated and a few other passengers, a crash occurred right after takeoff. It fell from the sky and exploded into a fireball in a heavily populated Philadelphia residential neighborhood near the Roosevelt Mall. Operated by Jet Rescue Air Ambulance, the small aircraft was traveling from Philadelphia to Tijuana, Mexico, with a planned stop at Springfield-Branson National Airport in Missouri when it went down, setting several houses ablaze near Roosevelt Mall. The Learjet 55 was carrying two passengers, a mother and daughter, and four crew members, all of whom were from Mexico. Flight logs show the plane was only in the air for about a minute before crashing.
