NEW YORK (AP) — A family of five Spanish tourists and the pilot are the fatal victims of the New York tourist helicopter that broke apart in the air on Thursday and crashed upside down in the Hudson River.
The Spaniards were an executive at Siemens, Agustín Escobar, his wife Merce Camprubi Montal, and their three children. Escobar worked for Siemens for over 27 years, most recently as the global managing director for railway infrastructure at Siemens Mobility, according to his LinkedIn account.
Photographs published on the company’s website showed the couple and their children smiling as they boarded the helicopter before taking off.
How did the helicopter accident in the Hudson happen?
New York Mayor Eric Adams said that the flight departed from a downtown heliport around 3 p.m. and that the bodies had been recovered and removed from the water. The flight, which took the aircraft north along the Manhattan skyline and then back south towards the Statue of Liberty, lasted less than 18 minutes.
A video of the accident showed parts of the aircraft falling through the air into the water near the coast of Jersey City, New Jersey. A witness who was there, Bruce Wall, said he saw the helicopter “breaking apart” in the air, with the tail and propeller detaching. The propeller continued spinning without the aircraft as it fell into the water, he commented.
Dani Horbiak was at her home in Jersey City, New Jersey, when she heard what sounded like “several shots fired in the air.” She looked out the window and saw the helicopter “falling into pieces in the river.”
“The helicopter was spinning out of control with ‘a lot of smoke coming out of it’ until it crashed into the water with force,” said Lesly Camacho, a hostess at a restaurant located on the riverbank in Hoboken, New Jersey.
The rescue boats surrounded the submerged aircraft just minutes after the impact, near the end of a long maintenance dock of a ventilation tower that services the Holland Tunnel. The rescue teams pulled the wrecked helicopter out of the water shortly after 8 p.m. using a floating crane.
The flight was operated by New York Helicopters, authorities said.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) identified the helicopter as a Bell 206, a model widely used in commercial and government aviation, including tourism companies, television news networks, and police departments.
A video of the helicopter crash suggests that a “catastrophic mechanical failure” left the pilot with no chance of saving the aircraft, commented Justin Green, an aviation attorney who was a helicopter pilot in the Marine Corps Infantry.
“It is possible that the main rotors of the helicopter hit the tail boom, breaking it and causing the cabin to fall freely,” said Green.