How helicopter crashed in the Hudson: Blades may have come off

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. 

NTSB announcement Friday

During the briefing, officials confirmed that the preliminary cause of the crash had not yet been determined and emphasized that they would not speculate. 

They also outlined their ongoing efforts to gather perishable evidence from the site to aid in the investigation.

They said the current focus is on collecting perishable evidence from the accident site. Investigators have recovered the rotor but are still searching for the main rotor and the tail rotor. Officials urged anyone who may have seen anything unusual to come forward and share that information.

The portion of the Hudson River where the helicopter went down was about five feet deep and rocky, according to officials.

Police said divers recovered items considered to be "not normal" approximately 75 feet from the shoreline and are keeping them to help paint a better picture of what happened.

Witnesses described seeing the helicopter "falling apart" in midair, with the tail and propeller coming off. There were also reports of the propeller spinning without the aircraft as it fell.

"The propeller just exploded and scattered, right," one witness said. "After that, we saw the plane just spiraling down like, going from left to right, like that, and we were like, ‘Oh my God.’"

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? 

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.

Certified pilot, meteorologist gives perspective

FOX 5 NY's meteorologist and certified pilot, Nick Gregory, says video footage made it "quite clear some sort of catastrophic failure happened exactly mid-flight." He explained that the rotor blades likely separated from the aircraft, which meant that "there’s no way to maintain any lift," rendering the pilot powerless.

Gregory further noted that once the blades detached, "it took out the tail, the tail rotor," leaving the pilot with no control over the aircraft. He explained that in cases of engine failure where everything else remains intact, pilots can perform a maneuver called "autorotation," where they use the momentum of spinning blades to safely land the helicopter. However, in this case, "there’s no power at all, no way to be able to control the situation."

While early reports suggested weather might have played a role, Gregory confirmed that the crash was a result of mechanical failure, not environmental factors. He pointed out that "the weather was deteriorating right during the recovery process" with winds gusting at about 30 mph, and rain starting to fall. He added that the water temperature in the Hudson was "in the 40s to about 50 degrees," limiting the time divers could spend in the cold water during recovery efforts. 

Unfortunately, Gregory stated, the "crash was too intense," and all six people on board did not survive.

What they're saying:

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.

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