Wednesday started as a pretty normal day at Reagan National Airport,

one of the busiest airports in the nation.

You know, that day there'd been probably about 700 flights

that takeoffs and landings from Reagan National.

That's our colleague Ben Katz.

He covers aviation.

And then suddenly flight 5342 got a call from air traffic controllers asking if they would,

instead of coming into the primary runway at Reagan National, instead take runway 33.

Washington, one star, 3200, 17, 1-8-3-3.

Yeah, we can do 33-4-2.

Flight 5342 was arriving from Wichita, Kansas, and had 64 people on board.

And less than a minute later, there was a sudden alert inside the air traffic control tower.

The alert said the Wichita flight was at risk of colliding with a military helicopter.

Air traffic control alerted the helicopter's crew to the plane.

The helicopter crew acknowledged that they were aware of the aircraft,

and then 15 or so seconds later the two aircraft

collided.

67 people have died and the search and rescue teams are still trying to recover all of the bodies.

How unusual is a tragedy of this scale? In the United States, very.

We haven't seen an air disaster kind of of this scale in the United States for 15 years.

But the scale of the fatalities in this incident on Wednesday evening makes it the deadliest aviation disaster since November 2001.

So you cover the airline industry.

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