What to Know
- National Transportation Safety Board officials are have begun the official federal investigation of the NYC sightseeing helicopter crash that killed five Spaniard tourists and a pilot.
- Aviation experts say a helicopter like the one involved in the crash may not have had a so-called black box, a flight recorder device used to help investigators in their investigation.
- New York Helicopter Tours, the company involved in the crash, has been involved in two other chopper incidents, with the most recent dating to 2015.
National Transportation Safety Board officials arrived in New York City to begin the official federal investigation of the New York City sightseeing helicopter that broke apart in midair on Thursday and crashed into the Hudson River, killing the pilot and a family of five.
While the investigation was still in the early stages as NTSB officials addressed the media on Friday, investigators will look at every piece of information, from weather conditions, to electronics, radar of the flight path to past maintenance records.
A black box, which is the a flight recorder device often used to help reconstruct the events of an aviation incident, may not have been used in the helicopter operated by New York Helicopter Tours, aviation experts say.
Pictures from inside the cabin of the chopper with tail number N216MH shows what was like inside as the family of five and the pilot went for the sightseeing trip of the New York City skyline.
According to police, the chopper took off from the Wall Street heliport at 2:59 p.m. on Tuesday, circling near the Statue of Liberty and the George Washington Bridge. Subsequently, the helicopter circled south, flying on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River when at around 3:17 p.m. 9-1-1 calls reported a chopper crash near the Holland Tunnel.
Thursday's crash is not the first aviation incident for the sightseeing company.
Records from the National Transportation Safety Board show New York Helicopter Tours had two past incidents involving helicopter crashes.
In June 2013, a helicopter carrying a Swedish family made an emergency landing in the Hudson River after the chopper lost power shortly after takeoff. The pilot, along with two adults and two children, were safely pulled out of the submerged chopper.
Two years later, in May 2015, a Bell 206L-3 New York Helicopter chopper was "substantially damaged" during a hard landing in Kearny, New Jersey, leaving the pilot injured. The subsequent investigation from the NTSB found that the there was a deliberate concealment and reuse of an "unairworthy" tail rotor driveshaft by unknown personnel.
Since 1977, at least 37 people have died in helicopter crashes in New York City, when an accident on a skyscraper landing pad led to restrictions on where choppers could land.
In 2019, two crashes occurred within a month. A pilot was killed on June 10, 2019 after hitting the roof of a skyscraper amid poor weather conditions. The helicopter struck the 750-foot AXA Equitable building, sparking a fire that forced office workers to flee.
Just weeks prior to that incident, on May 15, a helicopter crashed into the Hudson River and sank, but the pilot managed to safely escape.
