Charter company in fatal New York helicopter crash had prior mechanical failures

New York: 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.”

The helicopter involved in that crash was a Bell 206 model that New York Helicopter Charter was leasing from Meridian Helicopters, a Louisiana company. Meridian also owns the helicopter that plunged into the Hudson on Thursday, records show.

The crash killed Agustín Escobar, the CEO for rail infrastructure for the technology company Siemens, his three children and his wife, as well as the pilot, whose name had not been made public as of late Thursday. The cause remained under investigation.

In the 2013 episode, a family of four tourists from Sweden was taking a sightseeing tour on a Sunday morning in June, in a red Bell 206 that took off from a heliport near Wall Street.

As the helicopter lost power and began to descend over the water, the pilot inflated pontoons that kept the aircraft upright in the water. The passengers went to a hospital, but nobody was seriously injured.

In 2016, New York Helicopter Charter sued Aircraft Maintenance Specialists, a company that it had hired to repair the aircraft before it had to land in the river in 2013.

The operator accused the maintenance company of being negligent in its repair of the helicopter and failing to prevent the mechanical problems that resulted in the emergency landing. That case, filed in New York State Supreme Court, was closed in 2018, but the outcome was unclear.

Michael Roth, the CEO of New York Helicopter Charter, has been operating sightseeing flights in and around the city for about 30 years. Reached on Thursday after the fatal crash, Roth confirmed that the helicopter that went down had been leased by his company from its Louisiana-based owner.

Roth said that he could not explain what had happened on the flight. “I have no information whatsoever,” he said by phone from New Jersey. “I’m not there.”

He added that as a father and grandfather, he was “devastated” by the crash.

Court records suggest that New York Helicopter Charter had recently been facing financial difficulties.

One of its helicopters was repossessed in December after the company failed to make lease payments, according to a lawsuit filed in January in federal court in Manhattan by PHI Aviation, a Louisiana-based company that said it was owed $1.4 million.

And New York Helicopter Charter filed for bankruptcy in 2019, saying that its business had been harmed by changes in New York City policies on air traffic around the city.

It was a reversal for the company. In the mid-2000s, during a stock market boom, the helicopter business in New York thrived, and Roth told the New York Post that he expected demand to double.

He said he planned to hire more staff and acquire more helicopters to accommodate passengers who wanted to fly from Manhattan to the Hamptons. In court papers filed in 2023, Roth said his firm’s clients had included fashion designer Calvin Klein and hotel magnate Ian Schrager.

But his industry’s success led to growing complaints about excessive noise from helicopters hovering over Manhattan. In response, the city required operators like New York Helicopter Charter to enter into an agreement. To avoid being banned from the city-owned heliport near Wall Street, the companies agreed to stick to prescribed routes and not to fly on Sundays.