GhLinks Media
A young woman who sent her husband a haunting final text shortly before dying in the Washington DC plane crash has been identified.
Asra Hussain messaged husband Hamaad Raza, 25, to say ‘We are landing in 20 minutes’ as American Eagle Flight 5342 approached Reagan National Airport just before 8pm ET Wednesday night.
Tragically it was the last text Asra, 26, would ever send.
Her shaken husband of two years Hamza Raza, 25, was filmed explaining how he’d texted a few replies but that they’d never been received.
Asra was one of 60 passengers killed when the Bombardier CRJ700 jet – flown by American Airlines regional subsidiary American Eagle – was struck by a Black Hawk helicopter on an Army training sortie.
Four crew members on the plane also died, alongside three service personnel on the chopper.
‘She texted me that they were landing in 20 minutes. The rest of my texts didn’t get delivered and that’s when I realized that something might be up,’ a distraught Hamaad said at the airport.
‘I’m just praying that somebody’s pulling her out of the river right now, as we speak. That’s all I can pray for, I’m just praying to God,’ he told WUSA9.
Raza’s father, Dr Hashim Raza, identified him on social media, writing: ‘This my 25 yo old son who lost his beautiful wife. We are going to DC to be with him. Hug your family. We are devastated. Our Faith in God is unshakable.’
Dr Raza is a prominent doctor at Missouri Baptist Medical Center in St Louis.
Hamaad, an accountant at Ernst and Young, and Asra both went to Indiana University, according to their social media accounts.
He said his wife had gone to Wichita for work but that she’d never felt comfortable flying.
Hamaad and a family member were pacing anxiously through Terminal 2 at Reagan Airport Wednesday night, waiting for any news.
The WUSA reporter has described his conversation with Raza as ‘one of the most heartbreaking interviews of my professional career.’
The collision happened at around 9 p.m. when a regional jet at the end of a flight from Wichita, Kansas, collided with a military helicopter on a training exercise, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
A few minutes before the jet was to land, air traffic controllers asked American Airlines Flight 5342 if it could do so on a shorter runway, and the pilots agreed. Controllers cleared the jet to land and flight tracking sites showed the plane adjust its approach to the new runway.
Less than 30 seconds before the crash, an air traffic controller asked a helicopter if it had the arriving plane in sight. The controller made another radio call to the helicopter moments later, saying ‘PAT 25 pass behind the CRJ’ — apparently telling the copter to wait for the Bombardier CRJ-701 twin-engine jet to pass. There was no reply. Seconds after that, the aircraft collided.
The plane’s radio transponder stopped transmitting about 2,400 feet short of the runway, roughly over the middle of the Potomac.
