DC plane crash updates: 55 victims recovered and positively identified

Recovery crews are now awaiting heavy machinery, including cranes, from the Army Corps of Engineers, Coast Guard and private contractors before they can extract additional victims, sources familiar with the operation told ABC News.

The hope is the equipment will be in position to begin raising pieces of the fuselage as soon as today, but the operation is expected to last at least through the weekend, sources said.

The bodies of plane victims are lodged beneath and inside the fuselage and cannot be accessed by divers, the sources said.

The body of one soldier has been recovered; the other two Black Hawk victims remain inside the helicopter, sources said.

Debris is being collected at a spot near the airport. Military debris is being sent to Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling.

-ABC News’ Aaron Katersky

President Donald Trump is continuing to place apparent blame on the helicopter even though the National Transportation Safety Board says the cause of the crash remains under investigation.

Trump wrote on Truth Social that the Black Hawk "was flying too high, by a lot. It was far above the 200 foot limit."

"That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it???" he wrote.

The helicopter appeared to be flying at about 350 feet, above the mandated 200 feet, according to sources familiar with the operation.

On Thursday, Trump said the helicopter could have moved out of the way.

"I have helicopters. You can stop a helicopter very quickly. It had the ability to go up or down. It had the ability to turn. And the turn it made was not the correct turn, obviously, and it did somewhat the opposite of what it was told," Trump said at a press briefing. "We don't know that that would have been the difference because the timing was so tight. It was so, it was so little. There was so little time to think."

"Again, you could have slowed down the helicopter substantially," Trump continued. "You could have stopped the helicopter. You could have gone up, you could have gone down. You could have gone straight up, straight down, you could have turned. You could have done a million different maneuvers. For some reason, it just kept going, and then made a slight turn at the very end, and it was, by that time, it was too late."

The NTSB has said their preliminary report into what caused the midair crash between a passenger plane and Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac River on Wednesday night will take approximately 30 days and that it will take "a year or more" to get a final probable cause.

Todd Inman, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, appeared on "Good Morning America" on Friday, saying that the NTSB "will be on scene here doing all the recovery of the perishable evidence we need for as long as it takes."

"The preliminary report, we believe, will be out in 30 days but in case of these major investigations, it will take a year, if not more, for us to come to a final probable cause," Inman continued. "The most important thing is, the work doesn't just end then. We make recommendations so that we don't have tragedies like this again in the future."

Inman said that the voice recorder and the data recorder have been recovered from the plane and the NTSB has started the process of extracting data.

"The data recorder itself has thousands of data points and they all have to be synchronized against a lot of other things that happened in the plane," Inman said. "The voice recorders have to be what is called 'auditioned' among a number of people so that there's complete agreement of how the transcript will come out. We also look for ancillary noises. Maybe a boom or thud or crack or something in the cockpit. Those things are going on concurrently, along with the fact we have several hundred people in the field looking at every other aspect of this investigation."

Inman also said that it is way too early to make any conclusions about what exactly caused the crash.

"The only conclusion I know is last night we met with several hundred family members who lost their loved ones in the Potomac," he said. "We don't need that to happen anymore. We're going to work. We're going to continue. We're going find out what happened and we're going try to stop it from happening again."

The U.S. Coast Guard shared photos of the multi-agency recovery operation in the Potomac River following Wednesday's deadly collision.

The agency said boat crews from Washington, Curtis Bay, Annapolis, Oxford, Crisfield and the Coast Guard Cutter Sailfish were responding on Thursday.