The aircraft was carrying a family of five on a sightseeing tour when it went down on Thursday, killing the family and the pilot.
The aircraft was carrying a family of five on a sightseeing tour when it went down on Thursday, killing the family and the pilot.
The aircraft was carrying a family of five on a sightseeing tour when it went down on Thursday, killing the family and the pilot.
Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll get details on the crash of a sightseeing helicopter in the Hudson River. We’ll also find out about new “quality of life” teams that the Police Department plans to deploy to fight minor crimes.
Thousands of sightseeing flights take off from the heliports in and around New York City every year. The passengers oooh and ahhh as they cruise over landmarks like the Statue of Liberty. They pick out the Empire State Building, One World Trade Center and the Brooklyn Bridge. They pay around $400 a person for as much as 25 minutes in the sky.
It was one such flight that went down on Thursday, at least the third fatal incident involving a sightseeing helicopter in the city in the last 15 years. Aboard the aircraft, a Bell 206, were Augustín Escobar, the president of the Spanish branch of the technology company Siemens, and his wife and their three children, two officials said. The family was killed, as was the pilot, who was not identified.
The helicopter took off from Lower Manhattan and flew as high as 1,200 feet before dropping to about 600 feet, according to FlightAware, a flight-tracking database. Its speed was 102 miles an hour just before the drop in altitude.
On the ground, witnesses described the flight’s final moments. Some said they heard a loud noise and saw the helicopter drop into the river without its rotor. Peter Park, who works about a block from the Hudson in Jersey City, said he saw black smoke trailing from an aircraft — and the unattached rotors falling into the water.