'Controller was on phone during Hudson crash'

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said in a statement on Thursday that a controller at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey and his supervisor have been placed on administrative leave because the controller was involved in “apparently inappropriate conversations” at the time of the crash between a small plane and a tour helicopter that killed nine people.
The agency said while there was no reason to believe thus far that the employees’ actions contributed to the accident, such “conduct is unacceptable.”

The controller had handed off the monitoring of the small plane involved in the collision to another airport shortly before the plane collided with a tour helicopter.