A ‘bright flash’ – witness tells NBCpublished at 04:24 Greenwich Mean Time
We’re now hearing from those who witnessed the mid-air collision.
Ari Schulman said he saw a “stream of sparks” that resembled “a giant roman candle”.
He told NBC Washington that he was driving on George Washington Parkway, which runs along the airport, and spotted the plane landing. He noted he often sees planes landing at the airport along the drive and watched as it approached.
Everything looked normal, he told the outlet. “It was level, nothing was wrong.”
Schulman turned, and by the time he looked back, it “looked very, very wrong”.
The plane looked like it had banked hard to the right, maybe 90 degrees, he said. “I could see the underside of the plane, and it’s very, very dark out, so you shouldn’t be able to see the underside of the plane.”
Schulman said it was illuminated bright yellow and there “was a stream of sparks underneath it. It looked to me like a giant roman candle”. He said the sparks went from the nose of the plane to the tail.
He looked back at the road but didn’t hear any explosion or any boom. He looked for proof of a crash but there wasn’t any fire.
“I looked back to see a fireball. I looked back to see a crash, something, and I didn’t see anything. It looked completely normal,” he told NBC. “My first thought was to wonder if I was hallucinating. If there had just been this horrible plane incident, why didn’t I see anything afterward?”
He said as he drove through the area he started seeing the swarm of first responders.