An American Airlines plane colliding with a military helicopter over the Potomac River this week left 67 people dead and the Washington area stunned. The incident was the first commercial airline plane crash in the United States since 2009,

Jonathan Koziol, a retired Army chief warrant officer with more than 30 years of flight experience, told reporters that the flight was a nighttime qualification flight with an instructor pilot evaluating an experienced pilot on the flight routes that their unit routinely flies day and night around the Potomac River.