Salvage crews retrieve remains of passenger jet that crashed in Potomac River near Washington

Crews using a crane lifted the first pieces of wreckage from the downed American Airlines jet from the Potomac River on Monday morning as rescue workers sought to recover the last of the 67 bodies from the crash site near Ronald Reagan National Airport near Washington DC.

Six days after the plane and an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided in a fiery crash that left no survivors, a red crane lifted what appeared to be a chunk of the jet out of the water.

The snarled metal resembling an engine emerged from the grey water shortly before 10am (local time), beginning the process of extracting the plane and helicopter that once carried passengers, crew members and soldiers.

Colonel Francis Pera, the Baltimore district commander for the U. Army Corps of Engineers, which is helping to oversee the work, said the crew would carefully bring what is left of the plane to the surface with the help of Navy salvagers and dive teams.

Officials said it could take up three days to complete and will stop if human remains are found.

Around midday Monday, crews briefly put up a blue tent on part of the barge. Colonel Pera said a tent would be used to provide “full discretion” for human remains that may still be in the wreckage. By noon, the crane lifted a massive chunk of the plane’s smashed body, emblazoned on the side with an American flag.

Authorities said 11 more bodies were recovered Saturday, bringing to 55 the total number of victims found. There were 60 passengers and four crew members aboard American Eagle Flight 5342 and three soldiers on the Black Hawk helicopter.

After the civilian craft is out of the water, officials said they will turn to removing the helicopter. By February 12, officials said they should have debris elsewhere in the river removed.

Two airport authority employees were arrested and charged with leaking official airport records after video appearing to be from an airport surveillance camera was shown on CNN last week

The video aired Friday morning on CNN and provided a new visual angle of the crash between the jet and the Blackhawk helicopter. CNN anchor Kate Bolduan introduced the footage by saying it “appears to be surveillance video from the airport.”

Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority employee Mohamed Lamine Mbengue, 21, of Rockville, Maryland, was charged Friday with computer trespass for “making an unauthorixed copy of Airports Authority records,” authority spokeswoman Crystal Nosal said Monday. Mbengue was booked into the Arlington County jail and released.

On Sunday, authority employee Jonathan Savoy, 45, of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, was arrested and charged with computer trespass, Nosal said. He also was released pending trial.

The cause of the crash is under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. Questions include staffing at the airport control tower and the elevation and position of the Black Hawk, which was performing a night training flight near the busy airport.

Additional radar data will be released on Tuesday (local time) as investigators work to complete a more precise picture of what happened.

“We have much more granular data from Potomac TRACON that we’re going to be able to release,” National Transportation Safety Board boss Jennifer Homendy said, referring to a Federal Aviation Administration terminal radar approach facility in Virginia.

The Washington Post has reported that staffing levels were “not normal” on the night of the crash, and data from the Federal Aviation Administration shows the airport is three certified professional controllers below its staffing target of 28.

The NTSB said Saturday that data from the commercial jet’s recorder indicated a “verbal reaction” on board before the plane’s nose slightly lifted upward. Officials said they were analyzing the data recorder from the helicopter, hoping to learn its precise altitude and whether its crew members were wearing night vision goggles.

After the Wednesday night crash, flights at the airport resumed midday Thursday, and the facility returned to its normal operations Friday.