WASHINGTON (AP) — For some, it was the children’s luggage and small ice skates that became indelible memories of the night a passenger plane and a helicopter collided over the murky Potomac River. Others remember boats navigating debris and shallow water to bring victims’ bodies ashore. And there was the suddenness: people seconds from landing, gone.

Families of those on board American Airlines Flight 5342 and an Army Black Hawk helicopter are marking Thursday as the one-year anniversary of the deadliest plane crash on U.S. soil in more than 20 years. Another group is reliving that night and the days, weeks and months that followed: the emergency responders who dove repeatedly into the river with nearly zero visibility, braving cold water, jet fuel and jagged wreckage in the hope of rescuing survivors.

But there were no miracles, just the bodies of daughters, sons, wives, husbands, mothers and fathers to pull from the water, identify and return to their families.

Sixty-four passengers and crew of the airliner traveling from Wichita, Kansas, to Washington were moments from touchdown when the plane collided with the Black Hawk helicopter and its crew of three. All 67 died in the crash on Jan. 29, 2025.

“We knew at the one-hour mark there weren’t going to be any survivors,” said the District of Columbia's Fire and EMS chief, John Donnelly. The priority became recovering the bodies and the personal belongings and returning them to their families while gathering evidence for crash investigators.

Over nearly a week, divers and other emergency personnel recovered all of the victims from about 8 feet (2.5 meters) of water and undertook the painstaking task of identification. Others spent months scouring the river for personal effects.

“If you’ve ever been out on the Potomac, it’s not a pleasant place to dive under the best conditions,” said Tim Lilley, whose son Sam, 28, was the co-pilot of the American flight. “But on that night, the fact that they’re getting in the water and doing everything that they could was amazing.”

Tim Lilley, a former Black Hawk pilot, said that later in the spring, first responders took him and his wife, Sheri, out on the river so they could lay flowers at the places where the two aircraft came to rest.

"We were able to talk to the actual person that helped pull my son out of the water. It was a huge emotional experience, and it was so healing.”

The first call — “crash crash crash” — came from the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport control tower at 8:48 p.m.