World champion Russian figure skaters confirmed as being on board crashed US plane – Today news

US Figure Skating said on Thursday that several skaters were on an American Airlines regional passenger plane that crashed near Ronald Reagan national airport on Wednesday.

The plane, with 64 passengers and crew, was en route to Washington DC, from Wichita, Kansas, when it was involved in a midair collision with a US Army helicopter. All takeoffs and landings from the airport near the capital were halted as helicopters from law enforcement agencies across the region flew over the scene in search of survivors. Three soldiers were aboard the helicopter, a US official said. Multiple bodies have been pulled from the Potomac river, according to media reports. US senator Ted Cruz said “we know there are fatalities” but did not provide further details.

The governing body for figure skating in the United States confirmed that athletes, coaches and family members were returning from the national development camp held in conjunction with the US championships in Kansas.

“We are devastated by this unspeakable tragedy and hold the victims’ families closely in our hearts,” it said in a statement. “We will continue to monitor the situation and will release more information as it becomes available.” A source told Reuters that as many as 15 people on the flight may have been involved in figure skating. Officials have not said how many people died in the accident but have suggested that there may be no survivors.

The Kremlin meanwhile expressed its condolences to the families of Russian citizens who lost their lives in the crash, confirming that ice skating coaches and former world champions Yevgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov were among those on board. Their son, Maxim, also a skater, may also have been on the plane, Russia’s Tass and RIA news agencies reported. Tass reported Peskov as adding: “There were other fellow citizens of ours there too. Bad news from Washington today.”

Shishkova and Naumov, who were married, won the world championships in pairs figure skating in 1994 and lived in the United States, where they trained young ice skaters. Maxim Naumov had been competing at the US figure skating championships in Wichita, according to the event’s website.

Inna Volyanskaya, a former skater who competed for the Soviet Union, was also reported to have been on board, Tass said. She was a coach at the Washington figure skating club, according to its website.

The Federal Aviation Administration said the midair crash occurred around 9pm when a regional jet collided with the military helicopter 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.