JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – One of the 60 passengers on board the American Airlines flight that collided with an Army helicopter was the daughter of a Jacksonville lawyer.
Peter Nicandri told News4JAX that his daughter, Melissa Nicandri, was one of the victims who lost their lives in the tragic crash on Wednesday night.
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He said he and his wife had been with her over the weekend in New York when she announced she was taking a business trip to Kansas.
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Melissa Nicandri graduated from Ponte Vedra High School. She went to Vanderbilt University and then on to Johns Hopkins University before landing a job in New York City.
He wanted the world to know he was proud of his daughter and everything she accomplished.
“She’s just anything that anyone would want in a daughter. She was beautiful. Smart. Kind. Generous. Funny. She was a great sister. She was a great friend. She worked hard and had so much ahead of her,” Nicandri said.
He said he learned about her death when he received a phone call from her boyfriend who told him the 28-year-old was on Flight 5342 which took off from Wichita, Kansas and collided with the Blackhawk helicopter that had four crew members outside Reagan National Airport.
“They’ve already given us a timeline of the investigation so we will be monitoring, but it seems pretty obvious what happened, so we will see what the results are, but whatever the results are, it’s not going to change the fact that our daughter is gone.”
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News4JAX also spoke with a retired Army Col. David Abramowitz who has experience flying Blackhawk and Apache helicopters during his 30 years of serving the military.
He explained that collisions and near misses between military helicopters and civilian aircraft are more likely in congested urban airspace at night when flights operate under Visual Flight Rules (VFR).
“The challenge you have in a big city like that is the lights out there,” Abramowitz said. “Sometimes the aircraft gets caught in the lights and you just don’t see it. It’s happened to me many times. Many aviators have had lots of near misses because of the lights of big cities, and you can’t see the aircraft in front of you.”
Abramowitz said it’s a stark difference compared to flying in a busy airspace far from the big city.
“I never got scared flying in the desert,” Abramowitz said. “Flying where there are no lights because I had my night vision goggles on or flying during the day. But for most aviators when you get inside a big area with lots of lights as you’re going against a fixed wing, it is more of a challenge because you have to watch yourself.”