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World champion figure-skating Russian couple confirmed among the passengers in nightmare Washington air disaster
(Left) Screengrab via maxim.naumov_/Instagram (Center) Credit: Chris Cole/ALLSPORT (Right) Photo via @andyharnik/X

‘Unspeakable tragedy’: World champion figure-skating Russian couple confirmed among the passengers in nightmare Washington air disaster

Multiple figure skaters and coaches were on board at the time of the crash.

No matter how deeply we may believe we have things under control, life will never stop being unpredictable. This unpredictability is based on a duality: sometimes, it entails a positive experience, other times, like in the case of the American Airlines Washington crash, it’s a reminder that things can change in the blink of an eye, upending people’s lives forever.

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The tragedy occurred just before 9 pm on Wednesday, Jan. 30. Flight 5342, an American Eagle regional jet, was carrying 60 passengers and 4 crew members when it crashed into a military Black Hawk helicopter, which had 3 soldiers on board. The plane had taken off from Wichita, Kansas, and was about to land at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, in Crystal City, Virginia. As a result of the collision, around 19 nearby on-air flights had to be diverted.

Both helicopter and passenger jet plummeted into the Potomac River, which flows between Maryland, Washington D.C., and West Virginia. The river is not legally swimmable for public health reasons, but that, of course, did not stop the frantic rescue efforts.

Among the passengers, it has been reported that multiple people connected to the figure skating world were aboard, including former World Champion figure skating couple Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov.

An all-around tragedy

Retired Evgenia Shishkova, 53, and Vadim Naumov, 56, were returning home after attending the US Figure Skating Championships in Kansas, wherein their son, Maxim Naumov, 23, competed and placed fourth. While some social media posts allege Maxim, a Team US athlete, was on board, The Guardian offered no confirmation only speculation that he may have also been on the plane, whereas The Daily Mail reported that he was not among the passengers. It is said that Maxim left Wichita with a teammate on Monday after the competition.

Hopefully, Maxim – seen above in what may be the cutest interview ever conducted in figure-skating history – is alive and unscathed, but our hearts break for him, his family, and all those involved and affected.

The figure-skating power duo from Russia emerged victorious in the 1994 World Championship. They moved to the US in 1998 and had since retired, instead focusing on coaching and supporting their son in his own pro-skating journey.

Although fatalities have been confirmed, with no survivors to speak of yet, the people rescuers have already pulled out of the Potomac waters are still to be identified. The rescue efforts face harsh conditions which include severe cold and strong winds. As of the time of this writing, many of the crash’s victims remain unaccounted for, with at least 30 bodies recovered from the river.

As the TikTok user above states, “too many things had to go wrong for something like this to happen.” There are still too many questions left to be answered in regard to this tragedy. How could such a crash happen in one of the most tightly controlled airspaces? And a collision between a commercial airliner and a military aircraft, no less.

These answers will come in time, but, for now, and as should be our first response when unspeakable tragedies such as this one strike, we pray or do whatever goes according to our way of showing empathy and compassion.


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Author
Image of Margarida Bastos
Margarida Bastos
Margarida has been a content writer for 3 years. She is passionate about the intricacies of storytelling, including its ways of expression across different media: films, TV, books, plays, anime, visual novels, video games, podcasts, D&D campaigns... Margarida graduated from a professional theatre high school, holds a BA in English with Creative Writing and an MA in Text Editing/Publishing.