NEW YORK (AP) — A helicopter crashed on Thursday in the Hudson River off Manhattan and six people died, authorities said.
The city’s Fire Department reported receiving a report of a helicopter in the water at 3:17 pm.
Videos posted on social media showed the aircraft mostly submerged, upside down in the water. The Fire Department stated that they had units on site conducting rescue operations. The videos showed multiple rescue boats surrounding the aircraft.
The rescue boats were near a site close to the Manhattan shoreline, near the end of a long maintenance pier of one of the ventilation towers of the Holland Tunnel. Fire trucks and other emergency vehicles were on the nearby streets with their lights on.
The versions of the witnesses
The witness Bruce Wall claimed to have seen the helicopter “falling apart” in the air, with the tail and propeller detached. The propeller kept spinning without the aircraft as it fell, he added.
Lesly Camacho, a waitress at a riverside restaurant in Hoboken, New Jersey, commented that she saw the helicopter spinning out of control before crashing into the water. “There was a lot of smoke. It was spinning very fast and landed with a lot of force,” she said in a phone interview.
A video posted on social media showed parts of the helicopter falling into the water, and the overturned aircraft remained submerged, with rescue boats flying over it.
A city with the sky full of helicopters
The skies over Manhattan are routinely filled with planes and helicopters, including private recreational aircraft as well as commercial and tourist flights. Manhattan has several heliports that transport business executives and others to destinations throughout the metropolitan area.
Over the years, there have been multiple accidents, including a collision between an airplane and a sightseeing helicopter over the Hudson River in 2009 that killed nine people and the 2018 accident of a charter helicopter offering “doors-off” flights that crashed in the East River, killing five people.
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