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Tour helicopter with 6 aboard crashes in Hudson River

And this just happened too -

XEpaAvB.png

https://www.kcbd.com/2025/04/10/2-p...eportedly-clip-wings-reagan-national-airport/
 
RIP the victims:

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Apparently he was the CEO of Siemens in Spain.

Family from Spain.. out on their vacation.. gone just like that!.

And yeah has to be shoddy maintenance.. metal fatigue is a thing!

Kinda reminds me of that Crown plane crash in Florida some years back.. the wing just came apart due to metal fatigue and shoddy maintenance.
 
BTW I should add.. me and the wife used to go to the riverbank a lot.. and she asked me plenty of times if we could take the helicopter ride around Manhattan.

I'd always say no..

Maybe it's my history of PTSD trauma but I don't trust helicopters. I distinctly remember lots of helicopters falling into the river.

apnews.com

A history of helicopter wrecks in New York City

At least 32 people have died in helicopter accidents in New York City since 1977, when an accident on a skyscraper landing pad led the city to start putting restrictions on where choppers could land.
apnews.com apnews.com
 
I did not know there was such a tragic history of it there. All those regulations and they have not addressed this?
 
DAPUNISHER said:
I did not know there was such a tragic history of it there. All those regulations and they have not addressed this?
Click to expand...

I do a lot of DIY and came across this channel a few years ago while I was looking to build my own desk.

He loved helicopters and trained to be and became a helicopter pilot but then when he saw the shoddy maintenance.. he quit and started a table making business.


As I often say around here.. the smart amongst us have already left for better prospects elsewhere. Most of us if smart are planning to leave soon.

That is my way of thinking around questionable places.. both a helicopter and a country!
 
nakedfrog said:
Did you forget how quickly they blamed DEI for the DC plane crash?
Click to expand...
I get that he doesn't like them playing the blame game. And correlation does not equal causation. However, firing the ATCs being followed by an increase in air traffic accidents seems more like "where there is smoke there is fire" than random coincidence. Actions have consequences.
 
DAPUNISHER said:
I get that he doesn't like them playing the blame game. And correlation does not equal causation. However, firing the ATCs being followed by an increase in air traffic accidents seems more like "where there is smoke there is fire" than random coincidence. Actions have consequences.
Click to expand...
While I'm also not keen on the blame game, it's kind of irrelevant at this point, given that for my entire adult life everything bad that happens during a Democrat president's term gets pinned on them, and many things that happen once they're out of office also get blamed on them. If it's going to happen anyway, might as well turn it on the deserving.
 
nakedfrog said:
While I'm also not keen on the blame game, it's kind of irrelevant at this point, given that for my entire adult life everything bad that happens during a Democrat president's term gets pinned on them, and many things that happen once they're out of office also get blamed on them. If it's going to happen anyway, might as well turn it on the deserving.
Click to expand...
Understandable position. Clearly, the long time strategy of taking the high road has not worked, so fighting fire with fire does seem in order.
 
Indus said:
BTW I should add.. me and the wife used to go to the riverbank a lot.. and she asked me plenty of times if we could take the helicopter ride around Manhattan.

I'd always say no..

Maybe it's my history of PTSD trauma but I don't trust helicopters. I distinctly remember lots of helicopters falling into the river.

apnews.com

A history of helicopter wrecks in New York City

At least 32 people have died in helicopter accidents in New York City since 1977, when an accident on a skyscraper landing pad led the city to start putting restrictions on where choppers could land.
apnews.com apnews.com
Click to expand...
Yea, I've thought, just one time I'll take a ride on one of those things when I take a cruise up to Alaska to see a glacier. Then something like this happens and it reaffirms my feeling that I won't fly in something that at least can glide it's way down. In this instance you can see the fallacy of auto rotation, especially when either the main rotor failed and cut of the tail boom or the shaft powering the rear rotor snapped.
 
DAPUNISHER said:
RIP

Lack of maintenance ?
Click to expand...

Indus said:
RIP the victims:

And yeah has to be shoddy maintenance.. metal fatigue is a thing!

the wing just came apart due to metal fatigue and shoddy maintenance.
Click to expand...

fskimospy said:
I mean considering the number of daily helicopter flights in and around NYC that's not really that many, especially considering how helicopters are inherently unsafe.

Planes can fly/glide without power. Helicopters are flying bricks.
Click to expand...

Indus said:
I do a lot of DIY and came across this channel a few years ago while I was looking to build my own desk.

He loved helicopters and trained to be and became a helicopter pilot but then when he saw the shoddy maintenance.. he quit and started a table making business.


As I often say around here.. the smart amongst us have already left for better prospects elsewhere. Most of us if smart are planning to leave soon.

That is my way of thinking around questionable places.. both a helicopter and a country!
Click to expand...

DAPUNISHER said:
Seems logical there would be less yet, with better inspections and maintenance.
Click to expand...

hal2kilo said:
Yea, I've thought, just one time I'll take a ride on one of those things when I take a cruise up to Alaska to see a glacier. Then something like this happens and it reaffirms my feeling that I won't fly in something that at least can glide it's way down. In this instance you can see the fallacy of auto rotation, especially when either the main rotor failed and cut of the tail boom or the shaft powering the rear rotor snapped.
Click to expand...
Ohman… how to comment on these posts based on my 35 years in aviation mx. *sigh*

First of all, it’s a machine. Granted, a machine with 3,500 different parts moving at high speeds in opposite directions. Still, a machine and machines break.

Referring to inspection and maintenance of rotorcraft: they’re definitely more frequent, detailed, and require an extensive amount of experience to even know what you're looking at. I'm factory trained on that same aircraft manufacturer and engine. I will say I don't know that company specifically & their mx procedures or lack thereof. I can say unequivocally though, that pilot did not get in that aircraft that morning without a thorough preflight inspection. Anything *visually apparent* that would cause a main rotor to separate in the manner that it looks like happened in this incident would be very hard to overlook or miss. With the full load of people on board a catastrophic mechanical failure would have also occurred as he hovered in preparation for departure. NTSB Will eventually release a report.

I ran the inspection department for a Fortune 500 company that operated helicopters in that flight corridor for several years. Hundreds of flight hours… Between the tourist ops, business ops, and EWR it’s been confirmed by my pilots and myself that you better be on your A game or bad shit can happen fast af. That doesn't even factor in weather, comms with other AC or ATC.

Shoddy maintenance… hmm… I've seen it and I’ve also seen the effects of it. Corporate malfeasance has led to the budget cutting of the flight departments and foreign outsourcing for maintenance. DIYers & weekend warrior private pilots thinking changing their oil and tires on their plane is the same as their cars.

I dunno what happened exactly in this particular incident but I believe there is human error involved in some way. All the way from lack of manufacturing oversight of materials, parts and installation procedures up to pilot error.
 
DAPUNISHER said:
I did not know there was such a tragic history of it there. All those regulations and they have not addressed this?
Click to expand...

Seems at least some people calling for the flights to end

Heartbreaking that it involved young children.

The crash of a tourist helicopter on New York’s Hudson River on Thursday that killed a pilot and a Spanish family of five was “entirely predictable”, according to advocates who are calling for the closure of the region’s three heliports to non-essential traffic.

“A lot of these helicopters are 30 or even 40 years old, and this one was 21 years old, which is still pretty old,” said Andrew Rosenthal, the chair of the Stop the Chop group that has campaigned for an end to helicopter sightseeing trips over New York City and the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area.

“In New York if you have a yellow cab you have to get a new one every five to eight years, yet here we are letting these things fly in the sky at 30 and 40 years of age. There’s no age limit that I’m aware of, which is crazy.

“This was entirely predictable, and preventable. If we had a rollercoaster that killed people every two years, we would not keep it operating, yet we have the same kind of joy ride in the sky that kills people every couple of years, and we keep changing nothing,” he said.
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According to the Associated Press, at least 38 people have died in helicopter accidents in New York City since 1977.

A collision between a plane and a tourist helicopter over the Hudson in 2009 killed nine people, and five died in 2018 when a charter helicopter offering “open door” flights went down into city’s the East River.

Stop the Chop has documented a succession of other non-fatal incidents involving helicopters in and around New York City in recent years, and Rosenthal said it was beyond time that city officials ended tourism flights from the downtown Manhattan heliport from which the Bell 206 chopper took off on Thursday, and two other public-use helipads on the island of Manhattan.[/URL]
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Doesn't sound like the mayor is listening, though...

Eric Adams, the New York mayor, was asked about sightseeing flights on Friday on the Good Day New York TV show.

“After any form of malfunction, crash or challenge, sometimes that’s [the] immediate thought … we should ban the helicopters or we should not have this tourism type of attraction in our city,” he said.

“We have 65 million tourists that came into the city last year. This is all part of the attraction of being in New York. People want to see the city from the sky.

“What is crucial is that any airport or any air device, that is done with the proper maintenance and proper safety. And that’s what this investigation is going to determine.”
Click to expand...


www.theguardian.com

New York helicopter crash was ‘entirely predictable’, say campaigners

Calls to end non-essential traffic at city’s heliports after deaths of Spanish family of five add to at least 38 since 1977
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
“In New York if you have a yellow cab you have to get a new one every five to eight years, yet here we are letting these things fly in the sky at 30 and 40 years of age. There’s no age limit that I’m aware of, which is crazy.
Click to expand...
@iRONic

Expert opinion on that?
 
From the article there are apparently around 42,000 of these trips per year and from the data it looks like things average out to less than one death per year.

I would bet money that the 'stop the chop' people live around the helipads and don't like the noise. They just know that position is a loser. I mean I don't really care - I will never set foot in a helicopter if I can avoid it, but banning these flights seems like a huge overreaction.
 
DAPUNISHER said:
@iRONic

Expert opinion on that?
Click to expand...
If the actual frame part of the airframe isn't experiencing metal fatigue, it's fine. Those cabs get replaced because they get facefucked by the way taxi drivers handle them, and they're tooting around on saltwater for 7mo of the year. It's also cheaper to replace them than to swap the kind of things you need to swap, which tend to degrade as fast as the frame itself, making replacement largely irrelevant.

Some aircraft may have multi-part frames (I'm not sure on that one) letting you ship-of-theseus it a bit if you need, and if it's financially practical to do so, but our ability to science our way into getting a hundred ton hunk of metal to fly doesn't go away because the inert hunk of metal is a few decades older.
 
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