Family celebrating child's birthday perish in New York City helicopter crash

A family from Spain was about to celebrate the ninth birthday of one of their children when their sightseeing helicopter broke apart in midair and crashed into the Hudson River between New York City and New Jersey, killing all six people aboard in the latest U.S. aviation disaster, officials said Friday.

Authorities including the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating Thursday’s mid-afternoon crash. No new information on the possible cause was released Friday morning.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams said the children were 4, 8 and 10 years old, and the 8-year-old’s birthday was Friday.

“So this is probably part of the normal tourist attraction of seeing the city from the skyline,” Adams told Fox 5 New York. “But it’s just a real unfortunate situation. And our heart goes out to the family members.”

Dive teams were expected to return to the river Friday to continue the search for major parts of the helicopter.

Photos posted on the helicopter company’s website showed the couple and their children smiling as they boarded just before the flight took off.

The flight departed a downtown heliport around 3 p.m. and lasted less than 18 minutes. Radar data shows it flew north along the Manhattan skyline and then back south toward the Statue of Liberty.

Video of the crash showed parts of the aircraft tumbling through the air into the water near the shoreline of Jersey City, New Jersey.

A witness there, Bruce Wall, said he saw it “falling apart” in midair, with the tail and main rotor coming off. The main rotor was still spinning without the helicopter as it fell.

Dani Horbiak was at her Jersey City home when she heard what sounded like “several gunshots in a row, almost, in the air.” She looked out her window and saw the chopper “splash in several pieces into the river.”

The helicopter was spinning uncontrollably with “a bunch of smoke coming out” before it slammed into the water, said Lesly Camacho, a hostess at a restaurant along the river in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Rescue boats circled the submerged aircraft within minutes of impact near the end of a long maintenance pier for a ventilation tower serving the Holland Tunnel. Recovery crews hoisted the mangled helicopter out of the water just after 8 p.m. using a floating crane.



(AP Photo Seth Wenig)