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'Everything is on the table' in NYC helicopter probe, NTSB says

Allyson Versprille, Bloomberg News on

Published in News & Features

NEW YORK — The National Transportation Safety Board said it isn’t ruling anything out as it probes the deadly crash of a New York City tourist helicopter.

“Everything is on the table,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said Friday during a media briefing on the accident, in which a sightseeing helicopter plunged into the Hudson River.

The aircraft was carrying a senior executive at Siemens AG, as well as his wife and three children. All six people aboard the helicopter, including the pilot, were killed.

The crash, involving a Bell 206 L-4 helicopter operated by tour company New York Helicopter, is the latest in a series of aviation accidents that have sparked public concern about the safety of flying. Earlier in the year, a US military helicopter collided with an American Airlines Group Inc. regional jet, killing 67 people in the worst U.S. civil aviation disaster in decades.

The NTSB sent a team of investigators to the helicopter crash site Thursday evening, hours after the crash. The agency is reviewing a range of information as it tries to determine what caused the deadly accident, including reports of a large flock of birds in the area, the pilot’s qualifications and helicopter maintenance logs, Homendy said.

She also noted that the pilot who was flying the helicopter had accumulated about 788 hours of total flight time as of late March but that the NTSB was still determining how much experience he had in that specific Bell helicopter.

There have been several helicopter crashes around New York City in recent years. A helicopter slammed into the East River during a sightseeing excursion in 2018, killing five people and raising awareness of a safety issue with seat restraints.

 

Thursday’s accident isn’t the first involving New York Helicopter. In 2013, one of its aircraft carrying a family of four was forced to make an emergency landing in the Hudson River after experiencing engine trouble. The NTSB found the probable cause to be an “improper maintenance decision.” All four passengers and the pilot survived that incident.

Two years later, a pilot was forced to make a hard landing after a helicopter operated by the tour company spun out of control while hovering 20 feet (6 meters) above the ground at a heliport in northern New Jersey. The NTSB determined that the event was likely caused by the “deliberate concealment and reuse of an unairworthy” component by “unknown personnel.”

New York Helicopter filed for bankruptcy in 2019 because of a cash crunch following a move by New York City to cut back on helicopter traffic in the surrounding airspace. Michael Roth, the chief executive officer of the company, said after the latest accident that the tour operator was “tragically sorry for what happened” and is working with investigators.

The NTSB is coordinating with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration on the probe. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a post to social media Thursday that the FAA, which is part of the Transportation Department, would assemble a safety review team following the helicopter crash.

Duffy told reporters at a Friday event in New Jersey that he thinks the FAA should conduct a comprehensive review of helicopter tours across the U.S.

“Some of the safety records with some of these operators — they’re not the best,” he said. “And that’s why we have to take a look.”


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