Aviation Accidents, Safety and Disasters

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    Missing Rotor Is Recovered From Site of Helicopter Crash in Hudson River

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    The aircraft was on a sightseeing flight when it suddenly broke apart in midair, its rotor blades falling separately toward the water.When rescue crews reached the passenger compartment of the helicopter that plunged into the Hudson River on Thursday, killing all six of its occupants, the aircraft was missing several critical components, including the rotor and blades that had kept it aloft.On Monday afternoon, four days after the fatal crash, investigators fished several of those missing pieces out of the river, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency that is leading the investigation to determine the cause.Divers from the New York Police Department, working with the United States Army Corps of Engineers and the Jersey City Office of Emergency Management, recovered the helicopter’s main rotor system, its transmission and roof beam, the safety board said late Monday.The helicopter, a Bell 206L-4 LongRanger operated by New York Helicopter Tours, was on a sightseeing flight over the river on Thursday when it suddenly broke apart in midair.Videos posted on social media showed the rotor blades and part of the aircraft’s tail falling separately toward the water. The main body of the helicopter plummeted into the water on the western side of the river near Jersey City, N.J., and then floated upside down.The passengers — Agustín Escobar, Mercè Camprubí Montal and their three young children, Agustín, Mercè and Víctor — were all killed. The pilot, Seankese Johnson, also died.The chief executive of New York Helicopter, Michael Roth, said last week that he had no information about what had happened to the helicopter, which took off from a heliport in Lower Manhattan and was headed back there when it crashed.The Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates commercial air transportation, said on Sunday night that New York Helicopter had stopped taking customers on tours after the crash.Then on Monday night, the F.A.A. issued an emergency order to shut down New York Helicopter for safety reasons. The agency said that, after the crash, the company’s director of operations, Jason Costello, had said it would suspend operations. But within half an hour, Mr. Roth contacted the agency to say he had not authorized a suspension of operations and that Mr. Costello no longer worked for him.The F.A.A. called the “intentional firing” of Mr. Costello a retaliation and determined that it left the company without “sufficient qualified management and technical personnel to ensure the safety of its operations.”The transportation safety board said that its efforts to recover pieces of the helicopter had concluded. But its investigation is just getting underway.The safety board’s staff will conduct interviews and study the wreckage and the operator’s maintenance records to try to determine why the helicopter had broken apart. Its investigations often take several months and sometimes are not concluded for more than a year.On Tuesday, the safety board is holding a hearing to discuss its final report on a fire aboard a ship in Newark, in which two members of Newark’s fire department died. That fire happened in July 2023. More

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      At Least One Dead After Private Plane Crashes in Upstate New York

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      The plane, a Mitsubishi MU-2B carrying two passengers, went down Saturday in the town of Copake close to the Massachusetts border, according to the authorities.A plane crashed in a field on Saturday near the town of Copake, N.Y., leaving at least one dead, according to the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office.The plane, a Mitsubishi MU-2B bound for Columbia County Airport near Hudson, N.Y., was carrying two passengers and crashed a little after noon, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement.The aircraft went down near Two Town Road and did not damage any structures, Undersheriff Jacqueline Salvatore told reporters at a news conference on Saturday afternoon. Ms. Salvatore did not say how many people had been killed or if there were any survivors. The two passengers have not been identified.A private plane of the same model departed Westchester County Airport in White Plains, N.Y., shortly after 11:30 a.m., flying north toward Hudson before turning east at about noon, according to the tracking site Flightradar24. Minutes later, the craft disappeared from the site near Copake, a small town bordering Taconic State Park near the Massachusetts border.That plane was registered to a company based outside Boston, according to F.A.A. records.Ms. Salvatore said that, in addition to officers from the sheriff’s department, personnel from the New York State Police and a local fire department responded to the scene. Law enforcement officials received a 911 call about the crash at around noon, she said.At that time, the weather in the area was mostly mild, with overcast skies and wind gusts up to 26 miles per hour, according to the National Weather Service.Snow and moisture on the ground were hampering response efforts, Ms. Salvatore said.“It’s in the middle of a field and it’s pretty muddy, so accessibility is difficult,” she said.It was not immediately clear Saturday afternoon what had caused the plane to crash, Ms. Salvatore said, but local law enforcement planed to conduct interviews in the neighborhood to learn more.The F.A.A. and the National Transportation Safety Board are also investigating the crash, according to the aviation agency’s statement.In November of last year, a small plane carrying a pilot and four rescue dogs crashed roughly 50 miles west of Copake, in a remote area of the Catskill Mountains. In June, five members of a family were killed about 40 miles northeast of Binghamton, N.Y., when their small plane crashed en route from Cooperstown to Georgia. More

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      Charter Company in Fatal Helicopter Crash Had Prior Mechanical Failures

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      The firm that operated the helicopter that crashed in the Hudson River on Thursday, killing all six people aboard, has a long history of flying excursions around New York City, some of which have encountered safety problems.In 2013, one of the helicopters operated by the company, New York Helicopter Charter, was carrying a family of four on a sightseeing tour when it suddenly lost power. It was forced to make an emergency landing in the Hudson River near the Upper West Side of Manhattan.About two years later, another of its helicopters crashed while hovering 20 feet off the ground after taking off in northern New Jersey.In that episode, the pilot reported that the helicopter had started to spin out of control before he put it down for a “hard landing.” An investigation found that the aircraft had previously been involved in a hard landing in Chile in 2010 and that a drive shaft that was “unairworthy” was installed on the aircraft, according to a report by the National Transportation Safety Board.The investigation found that the faulty drive shaft had been painted by a previous owner, making it impossible to tell whether it had been part of the helicopter during the earlier hard landing.The investigators found that the probable cause of the crash was “deliberate concealment and reuse” of the faulty component “by unknown personnel.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Helicopter Crashes Into Hudson River, Killing Six

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      An executive from Spain, his wife and three children died in the crash, along with the helicopter’s pilot, officials said.A sightseeing helicopter tumbled out of the sky and plunged into the Hudson River across from Manhattan on Thursday afternoon, killing all six people aboard, including three children, officials said.Video footage showed the helicopter falling end over end and crashing into the water just off Jersey City, N.J., at high speed at about 3:15 p.m. Witnesses reported hearing a loud bang and seeing the helicopter hit the river without at least one of its rotor blades.Two adults and three children from Spain — Agustín Escobar, an executive with the technology company Siemens, and his family — were pulled from the helicopter or the frigid river but none survived, a senior law enforcement official said on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the crash. The pilot was also killed.Two of the passengers were alive when divers pulled them from the water but later died, New York City’s police commissioner, Jessica S. Tisch, said at a news conference.“Six innocent souls have lost their lives, and we pray for them and their families,” Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York said.It was the deadliest helicopter crash in New York City in at least seven years.The helicopter, a Bell 206, was operated by New York Helicopter, which runs sightseeing tours for several hundred dollars a flight. The company’s chief executive, Michael Roth, said he did not know what had happened to the aircraft, which he had leased from a company in Louisiana. The National Transportation Safety Board was leading the investigation into the crash.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Pilots Discussed Alternate Ways to Land Before Deadly Jeju Air Crash

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      The pilots’ conversation with air traffic controllers, revealed in a partial transcript, could offer clues to what caused the disaster in South Korea, which killed 179 people.The pilots of Jeju Air Flight 2216 signaled three different plans for landing the stricken plane in the minutes before it crashed and killed 179 people in December, according to a partial transcript of their communication with air traffic controllers obtained by The New York Times.The transcript shows that the pilots reported a bird strike and radioed a mayday call as they approached Muan International Airport in South Korea on the morning of Dec. 29. They said they would turn left, then asked to turn right, intending to approach the airport’s sole runway from the south. When that failed, air traffic controllers asked if they wanted to land from the opposite direction, and the pilots said yes.The plane landed on its belly, overran the runway and struck a concrete structure that housed navigation aids, bursting into a deadly fireball. Only two people — flight attendants at the very back of the plane, a Boeing 737-800 — survived.The cause of the disaster, the deadliest plane crash on South Korean soil, is still being investigated, and the exchange between the pilots and the control tower could be a crucial piece of the puzzle. That is because it covers a period of about four minutes during which both of the plane’s flight recorders, known as black boxes, had stopped recording.The transcript includes no information about the state of the jet’s two engines or its electrical supply, which are intense areas of focus for investigators. It is still unclear why the black boxes went dark or why the plane’s landing gear was not engaged.The transcript was read out on Saturday to relatives of the victims by a representative of a board that was set up to investigate the crash. The official told them that the readout excluded parts of the conversation to protect the privacy of its participants, according to people who shared it with The Times. Officials have not publicly released the transcript, and the board did not immediately respond to a request for comment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Small Plane Crashes in a Minneapolis Suburb, Killing at Least One, Officials Say

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      No one in the house was injured after the plane crashed in Brooklyn Park, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis, officials said.A small plane crashed in a residential area in Brooklyn Park, Minn., on Saturday, leaving a house in flames.ABC NewsAt least one person was killed after a small plane crashed into a house in a Minneapolis suburb on Saturday afternoon, engulfing the home in flames, according to the Federal Aviation Administration and local officials.No one in the house was injured after the plane crashed in Brooklyn Park, Minn., Risikat Adesaogun, the city’s communications manager, said. Shawn Conway, the city’s fire chief, said no one aboard the plane survived, though it was not immediately known how many people were aboard.The plane, which the F.A.A. identified as a SOCATA TBM7, seats a maximum of seven people, according to GlobalAir.com.The home that was hit was a “complete loss” and there was minor damage to nearby homes, Ms. Adesaogun said. The F.A.A. and the National Transportation Safety Board were traveling to Brooklyn Park to investigate the crash.The plane took off from Des Moines International Airport in Iowa and was headed to Anoka County-Blaine Airport in Minnesota, the F.A.A. said, when it crashed at 12:20 p.m. in Brooklyn Park, a city of about 82,000 people that is 11 miles north of Minneapolis.Footage from a Ring security camera appeared to show the plane nose-diving a short distance away. Videos from the scene also showed a large home engulfed in flames.Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said on social media that his team was “monitoring the situation closely.” More

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      D.C. Plane Crash Echoes Boston Skating Club’s 1961 Tragedy

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      Two months after the D.C. plane crash killed 67, including six people affiliated with the Boston club, the members had to prepare for the world championships. Unfathomably, they had a blueprint.One floor above the ice rinks at the Skating Club of Boston, there’s a lounge that would have hosted a party after January’s U.S. Figure Skating national championships.Its glass doors would have been thrown open, and its fireplace set aglow, as several hundred people gathered to toast the club’s latest champions, the pairs skaters Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov, who had won their first national title.But that celebration never happened. It couldn’t, and it wouldn’t, after six of the club’s members died in a plane crash on Jan. 29 in Washington. Twenty-eight passengers involved in skating, including 11 young athletes and four coaches, were among the 67 people killed that day.Jinna Han, 13, and Spencer Lane, 16, two of the organization’s up-and-coming skaters, were traveling home with their mothers from a development camp held after the nationals in Wichita., Kan., when an Army helicopter collided with their passenger jet above the Potomac River. No one survived. Two of the club’s coaches — Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shishkova, a married couple who were the 1994 world champions in pairs — were also on the plane.Yet the lounge at the Boston club did not remain empty. In the hours and days after the crash, one by one, or arm in arm, people arrived and filled the space, drawn to the beloved club that has existed for more than a century, and to a community that many consider a second family.Paul George, a longtime club member, hugs former Olympic figure skaters Dr. Tenley Albright and Nancy Kerrigan.Sophie Park for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Plane Fire at Denver Airport Forces Passengers to Evacuate Onto Wing

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      The flight had been diverted to the airport after experiencing “engine vibrations,” the authorities said. Six passengers were taken to a hospital for evaluation.American Airlines, which operated the flight, said the plane had experienced an “engine-related issue.”Branden Williams/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAn American Airlines plane that was diverted to Denver International Airport on Thursday evening after experiencing “engine vibrations” caught fire while taxiing to a gate, prompting the evacuation of dozens of passengers, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.Six passengers were taken to a hospital for further evaluation, the airline said. Their conditions were not immediately known.The flight, a Boeing 737-800 with 172 passengers and six crew members, was traveling from Colorado Springs to Dallas but was diverted to the Denver airport, the airline said. Some of the passengers were evacuated from the aircraft using slides, the F.A.A. said.“After landing safely and taxiing to the gate at Denver International Airport, American Airlines Flight 1006 experienced an engine-related issue,” the airline said. Videos posted to social media showed passengers standing on the plane’s wing and climbing down a portable staircase to leave the plane. Light gray smoke filled the air. From other angles, black smoke poured out of the aircraft and orange flames could be seen at the base of the aircraft.A video taken by Mike Insalata, a Denver resident, showed a large fire under the plane’s left engine. The F.AA. is investigating.The episode at Denver International Airport was the latest in a recent string of aviation woes. On Feb. 25, two separate airplanes, one at Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport and another at Chicago’s Midway International Airport, had to abort landings to avoid collisions.Earlier last month, a plane at the Toronto Pearson Airport flipped over. And on Feb. 5, the wing of a plane was impaled on the tail of another plane during a collision on the ground at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. More

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      3 People Killed in Medical Helicopter Crash in Mississippi

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      A pilot and two crew members were aboard the helicopter, which was not carrying any patients when it plunged into the woods outside Jackson.All three people working aboard a medical helicopter were killed when it crashed into a densely wooded area outside Jackson, Miss., on Monday while returning from transporting a patient, hospital officials said.Two of the people were crew members who worked for the University of Mississippi Medical Center and the other was a pilot, Dr. LouAnn Woodward, the medical center’s top administrator, said during a news conference. The helicopter was not carrying any patients at the time of the accident, she added.It was not clear what caused the aircraft, which the Federal Aviation Administration identified as a Eurocopter EC-135, to lose control. The F.A.A. said that it and the National Transportation Safety Board would investigate the crash, which occurred around 1:15 p.m.Officials did not release the names of the three people who died. They were based out of Columbus, Miss., and were part of AirCare 3, one of four medical helicopter units operated by the medical center.“The entire medical center family is heartbroken over this,” Dr. Woodward said. “This is the crew that responds to emergencies all across the state, and to see them today to respond to one of their own was just something that you can’t put into words.”Dr. Woodward said that the AirCare helicopters and their crews played an integral role in providing critical care services across Mississippi, and that they had a spotless safety record until the crash on Monday.The crews frequently include nurses and paramedics, according to an information page on the medical center’s website. They are equipped with oxygen, ventilators and other critical care equipment.Dr. Woodward said that the pilot who died worked for Med-Trans, the company that leases the AirCare helicopters to the medical center.The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.The crash happened a little more than five weeks after a medical jet crashed in Philadelphia, killing six people aboard the plane and one person on the ground. And it added to a spate of recent aviation accidents. On Jan. 29, an American Airlines regional jet and an Army helicopter collided over the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., leaving no survivors. On Feb. 17, a Delta Air Lines flight trying to land at Toronto Pearson International Airport amid strong winds and drifting snow crashed and flipped over on the tarmac; all 80 people who were aboard that plane survived. More