THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED TO CORRECT A MISSTATEMENT

Pilots of the American Airlines flight that crashed into the Potomac after a collision with a US Army Black Hawk helicopter last month seem to have made a desperate attempt to avoid the crash, data from the airliner’s cockpit suggests. This poignant detail is just part of a trove of information released by the National Transportation Safety Board.

What had been an ordinary flight from Witchita to Washington started to get strange to the American Airlines pilots as they approached landing. The warning of a possible collision could be heard in the background of a radio transmission from the tower, as the controller asked Black Hawk pilots if they had American flight 5342 in sight.

The next second, the alert sounded in the jetliner’s cockpit as its traffic collision warning system was triggered.

“At 8:47:40 the CRJ received an automated traffic advisory on the TCAS system stating ‘traffic, traffic’,” Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board said at a press conference on Friday.

Though the Army pilots, on a training flight through the airport’s airspace, confirmed they saw the plane, it appears they did not have eyes on Flight 5342 because 19 seconds later it flew into the airliner, creating a fireball and sending both aircraft into the icy Potomac. Sixty-seven people died.

During those critical 19 seconds, there was no indication on the American flight’s cockpit voice recorder that the pilots saw the intruder headed for them. But their actions as revealed via the flight data recorder, suggest they did just before impact, because they pulled the airplane into a maximum climb.

“We see a pitch-up of the aircraft. So it was nine degrees up, maximum elevator deflection,” Homendy said. “So there was an indication that they may have seen something.”

The last-minute attempt to fly out of trouble, and the alert, “traffic, traffic,” 19 seconds before, leads retired airline captain and ABC News commentator John Nance to the same conclusion. “Something caught the pilot’s eye,” he surmises, but human reaction time couldn’t keep up with the speed of the approach.

Just as the actions of the pilots of Flight 5342 reveal a slice of the story, investigators are finding intriguing leads from the black boxes and wreckage of the Army helicopter. Details about equipment, decision making and communication are ripe for follow-up.

On two occasions during the ill-fated Army training flight, pilots seem to have made critical decisions based on erroneous information, confirming they had Flight 5342 in sight when they did not for one, and failing to resolve an inconsistent altitude reading as the helicopter approached the busy airport.

Five minutes before striking the jetliner, the pilot flying the Black Hawk reported an altitude of 300 feet.

“The instructor pilot indicated they were at 400 feet,” Homendy said. “Neither pilot made a comment discussing an altitude discrepancy.” This raises questions about crew communication and error trapping.

But wait, there’s more. When it comes to equipment and maintenance, the NTSB has so far been unable to get confirmable altitude data from the aircraft and does not know what the pilots might have seen on their instruments. And while the Black Hawk is equipped with ADS-B, the latest technology that allows aircraft to passively transmit extremely accurate location and other data to ATC, it wasn’t working on the Army helicopter.

“We don’t know why it wasn’t transmitting,” said Sean Payne, branch chief of the NTSB’s vehicle recorder division. “We will have to look at the installation, programming, some equipment malfunction or if ADS-B was turned off.”

Finally, there is the use of night vision goggles during the flight. As others have reported, and I can attest from attending a workshop on the use of NVGs at a company providing them for the Army, this amazing technology works best in low-light situations. But the kind of light pilots would encounter flying over a brightly lit city like the nation’s capital can overwhelm goggle-wearers.

The safety board can only surmise the pilots were wearing goggles. According to the Army, the training flights include NVG flying, but how much? Homendy says investigators are not sure.

The helicopter pilots were “likely wearing NVG throughout the flight,” she said. “Had they been removed the crew was required to have a discussion about going unaided. There is no evidence on the CVR of such a discussion.”

And with that, crew communication again shows itself a bright target for investigators to follow, preferably without goggles.

Watch the entire NTSB News Conference here.