Helicopter in Hudson River Crash Lacked Recorder, NTSB Says

(Bloomberg) — The helicopter that plunged into the Hudson River on Thursday and killed all six people aboard was on its eighth sightseeing trip of the day and lacked a flight data recorder, federal investigators said.

The Bell 206 L-4 helicopter had completed seven flights before it went down shortly after takeoff, the National Transportation Safety Board said Saturday in an investigative update. The aircraft was not equipped with a cockpit voice recorder or flight data recorder, and no onboard video or camera devices have been recovered, it said.

The aircraft’s last major inspection was on March 1. It was carrying a senior executive at Siemens AG, his wife and three children as passengers when it crashed near Jersey City, New Jersey. 

Divers from the New York City Police Department are still searching the river for critical components, including the main rotor, tail rotor, main gearbox, and a large section of the tail boom. It’s using scanning sonar to identify possible locations of wreckage and recovery operations will continue into Sunday, the NTSB said.

The cockpit, cabin, parts of the tail boom, the vertical fin, and horizontal stabilizer finlets have been recovered, the NTSB added. Some of those components will be sent to NTSB laboratories in Washington for closer inspection, and investigators have begun evaluating the flight control system at a secure facility.

The pilot had logged 788 total flight hours as of late March, though the NTSB is still working to determine how many of those hours were in the Bell 206 model. 

Investigators have met with representatives from the tour operator, New York Helicopter Charter Inc., and reviewed operational policies, safety protocols, and maintenance records. They also examined two similar helicopters as part of the ongoing probe.

The crash adds to a troubling safety history for New York Helicopter. In 2013, one of the company’s aircraft made an emergency landing in the Hudson due to engine failure — later attributed by the NTSB to “improper maintenance decisions.” In 2015, another incident involved a hard landing blamed on the reuse of an “unairworthy” component.

New York Helicopter filed for bankruptcy in 2019 after city officials cracked down on helicopter traffic over Manhattan. Following the latest crash, CEO Michael Roth said the company was “tragically sorry for what happened” and is cooperating with investigators.

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