An Industry With a Deadly Record
Elected officials and community leaders have responded swiftly to Thursday’s crash of a New York Helicopter Tours sightseeing flight in the Hudson River that killed all six people on board. The helicopter took off from the Downtown Manhattan Heliport at Pier 6 on the East River.
City Council member Christopher Marte said, “what happened is not an accident without context – it was wholly preventable. This is the second such accident in six years involving tourist helicopters. Each one of these people could still be with us if our federal government took action to ban a completely unnecessary industry that continues to put lives at risk. Helicopters should be reserved for emergency response, essential news coverage and public safety operations – not sightseeing or luxury travel. While now is a moment for grief, it is also a moment for serious reflection and urgent policy change.”
“One of the biggest challenges I have faced while trying to address this issue in the City Council is that many of these helicopters take off from across the river in New Jersey, outside of New York City’s jurisdiction,” he added. “That’s why we need federal action – urgently – to regulate this industry, close loopholes, and put public safety ahead of profit.”
U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer said, “there is one thing we know for sure about New York City’s helicopter tour companies: they have a deadly track record, and it is usually the companies – not the pilots – that are openly manipulating Federal Aviation Administration rules, cutting corners and putting profits over people. We saw something like this in the 2018 FlyNyon crash that killed five in the East River, and we very well could see it in this case, as it relates to maintenance and other helicopter safety protocols that were possibly ignored or dismissed by the company, New York Helicopter Tours.”
Federal regulators announced over the weekend that New York Helicopter Tours had ceased operations. The flight that crashed on Thursday took off at around 3pm from the heliport located near the Battery Maritime Building on the East River. It flew toward the Statue of Liberty, then north up the Hudson River along the Manhattan side to the George Washington Bridge, where it turned and flew south along the New Jersey side. Approximately 16 minutes after beginning its flight, the helicopter broke apart in mid-air and plummeted into the water near Hoboken. In the image below showing investigators at the scene, from an ABC News report, the Battery Park City ferry terminal can be seen across the river.
A coalition of Lower Manhattan residents and community leaders have decried for more than a decade the safety and quality-of-life concerns associated with incessant buzzing of the local skyline by tourist flights.
These concerns became more urgent in the 2018 incident mentioned by Senator Schumer. What had never been publicly acknowledged before the March 2018 incident was that passengers on “doors-off” sightseeing flights, who wear cumbersome safety harnesses to prevent them being ejected from the aircraft as it banks and dives, are also issued knives with which to cut themselves out of these restraints in an emergency. These blades did not save any of the passengers on the 2018 tourism flight. But in the hands of a terrorist with some cockpit training, they could be used to take control of the helicopter.
In January 2020, the National Transportation Safety Board issued a finding that, in the 2018 incident, the “operators intentionally exploited regulatory loopholes to avoid the more robust oversight intended for revenue-passenger carrying operations, including those for commercial air tours.” This determination concluded that the tour operators deliberately (and misleadingly) classified the doomed excursion as “an aerial photography flight,” while “the investigation determined the intended purpose of the flight was an air tour.”
The Downtown Manhattan Heliport has cap of 29,650 tour flights per year, which allows for more than 80 flights per day. The helicopter that crashed on Thursday afternoon was on its eighth flight of the day.
In December, Melissa Elstein, the board chair and president of Stop the Chop (a grassroots coalition of waterfront residents in Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey that is lobbying to scale back the flight tours) testified before the City’s Department of Small Business Services. “It is insanity that the City government, knowing noise complaints are the number one source of citizens’ complaints, would host one of the noisiest businesses that exists,” she said. “Especially when there are quieter and more environmentally friendly ways to sightsee in our City, such as bikes, boats, and walking tours.”
“One of the main roles of government is to keep its residents safe and to provide essential services,” she continued. “Continuing to allow these helicopter tours creates the opposite conditions, and therefore the City government should end them immediately.”