A helicopter carrying five people on a private tour for a birthday celebration sputtered and crashed into Manhattan’s East River on Tuesday afternoon shortly after takeoff from a riverbank heliport, killing one passenger and injuring three others.
The victim, visiting New York with her family to celebrate her 40th birthday, was apparently trapped inside as the chopper sank about 15m below the surface of the swift-moving water, police said. New York Police Department divers pulled her from the water about 90 minutes after the Bell 206 Jet Ranger went down at about 3pm. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
Emergency crews arrived within seconds of the crash to find the helicopter upside-down in the murky water with just its skids showing on the surface. The pilot, Paul Dudley, and three passengers were bobbing, and witnesses reported a man diving down, possibly in an attempt to rescue the remaining passenger.
The passengers were friends of the pilot’s family: Paul and Harriet Nicholson, a British husband and wife who live in Portugal; the wife’s daughter, Sonia Marra, also British, who died at the scene; and the daughter’s friend, Helen Tamaki, a New Zealand resident. The daughter and her friend were living in Sydney.
They met in New York to celebrate the birthdays of Marra and Paul Nicholson, 71. They were sightseeing and had planned to go to Linden, New Jersey, for dinner afterward, police said.
The pilot’s wife, Sunhe Dudley, said she had spoken to her husband briefly after the crash.
“I think that he’s OK,” she said. “These were actually very dear friends of ours that were in the helicopter.”
The three surviving passengers were pulled from the water shortly after emergency crews arrived on the scene, police spokesman Paul Browne said. All were hospitalized. The pilot was uninjured and swam to shore.
The private chopper had apparently had run into trouble and was trying to return to the heliport when it went into the river off 34th Street in midtown Manhattan, a few blocks south of UN headquarters. It’s unclear what happened, but witnesses reported it was sputtering and appeared to be in some type of mechanical distress.
Joy Garnett and her husband were on the dock waiting to take the East River ferry to Brooklyn when they heard the blades of a helicopter and saw it start to take off from the nearby helipad.
She said she saw it do “a funny curlicue.”
“I thought, ‘Is that some daredevil move?’” she said. “But it was obviously out of control. The body spun around at least two or three times, and then it went down.”
She said the chopper had lifted about 7.5m off the ground before it dropped into the water without much of a splash. It flipped over and the blades were sticking up out of the river.
A massive rescue effort was under way within minutes of the crash, with a dozen boats and divers down into the cold, gray water. Police officers doing a counterterrorism drill nearby jumped into the water wearing their uniforms and without any rescue equipment they pulled the three passengers to shore.
“The pilot did indicate that there was somebody still in the helicopter,” Lieutenant Larry Serras said. “By the time we swam to the helicopter it was completely submerged.”
Officer Jason Gregory, one of the divers who brought Marra’s body to the surface, said the helicopter was upside down in the sediment. He said Marra was in the back seat and was not buckled in by any seat belt.
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