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.
Investigators are working to establish the cause of Thursday’s crash, in which witnesses reported seeing the helicopter break up in midair and plunge in pieces into the river that runs between the west side of Manhattan and the eastern shore of New Jersey.
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.
According to the Aviation Property Network, a specialist real estate company, the facilities generate a combined $2.7m annually for New York in lease payments from companies that operate more than 42,000 sightseeing trips annually.
“The mayor can close down the Manhattan downtown heliport tonight, if he wanted to, one stroke of a pen and no other legislation needed,” said Rosenthal, whose group said more than 30,000 of the flights took off from there.
“This is not the first crash, it’s another one in a long series. It’s predictable. It’s going to happen again, it’s just a matter of numbers. We’re OK with police, military, government, news, those are considered essential in our definition, but these non-essential flights are totally not needed.”
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.”
