NEW YORK – A helicopter crashed into the Hudson River Thursday afternoon, killing all six on board.
According to police, on board was a pilot, two adults and three children visiting from Spain.
Bell 206 helicopter
Dig deeper:
According to Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, the helicopter is a Bell 206 flying for New York Helicopters.
It’s a two-bladed helicopter that can carry up to seven people.
How did the helicopter crash?
What they’re saying:
The only evidence at this point in the investigation is eyewitness accounts and bystander video, both of which suggest that the helicopter’s rotor blades – and maybe even the entire assembly – separated mid-flight, with catastrophic consequences.
Witness Bruce Wall said he saw the helicopter “falling apart” in midair, with the tail and rotor coming off. The rotor was still spinning without the aircraft as it fell, he said.
Kyle Bailey, an aviation analyst, said it was “likely” that the separating rotor blades may have sliced off the aircraft’s tail boom.
Such a scenario would have been unrecoverable, aviation expert JP Tristani explained. Tristani, who is not connected to the investigation, said that in a two-bladed helicopter, if one blade or the articulating head fails, it can bring down the entire aircraft.
“If that articulating head actually separated from the aircraft, the aircraft was doomed. There’s no possibility of that aircraft ever having made a normal type of landing. It was going to crash,” said Tristani. “In this particular case though, when you throw a blade, one blade or the entire head, no, you’re just a falling brick.”
Tristani said the helicopter pilot did not send a transmission of an emergency.
“The very fact that the entire head would come off the helicopter, that’s a massive failure,” Tristani said.
New York Helicopter Tours
Michael Roth, CEO of NY Helicopter Tours, expressed his devastation, saying, “It’s devastation, I’m a father and a grandfather and to have children on there, I’m devastated. I’m absolutely devastated. And I haven’t seen anything like that in my 30 years in the helicopter business.”
Big picture view:
The skies over Manhattan are routinely filled with both planes and helicopters, both private recreational aircraft and commercial and tourist flights. Manhattan has several helipads that whisk business executives and others to destinations throughout the metropolitan area.
Over the years, there have been multiple crashes, including a collision between a plane and a tourist helicopter over the Hudson River in 2009 that killed nine people and the 2018 crash of a charter helicopter offering “open door” flights that went down into the East River, killing five people.
A medical transport plane killed seven people when it plummeted into a Philadelphia neighborhood in January. That happened two days after an American Airlines jet and an Army helicopter collided in midair in Washington, D.C. — the deadliest U.S. air disaster in a generation.
The crashes and other close calls have left some people worried about the safety of flying.
The Source: This story includes information from aviation experts JP Tristani and Kyle Bailey, reporting from FOX 5’s Linda Schmidt and details from a press briefing by NYPD and NYC Mayor Adams.
