The helicopter has been a fixture in New York City for decades.
In 1945, Fiorello La Guardia, the city’s favorite son, became the first American mayor to ride in one. Four years later, the city opened its first commercial heliport, with gee-whiz fascination that likened the bladed aircraft to an “infuriated palm tree.”
But for many New Yorkers, the fanfare has long since faded.
On Thursday, a family of five and their pilot died when their helicopter slammed into the Hudson River. Sean Duffy, the U.S. secretary of transportation, said on social media that his department has begun an investigation into the cause of the crash.
At least 32 people have died in helicopter accidents in New York City since 1977, according to The Associated Press. Thursday’s crash was the deadliest since at least 2018, when a sightseeing helicopter without doors fell into the East River, flipped over, and five people drowned.
An invention once synonymous with military might, then with the wonder of the city skyline, the helicopter is now regarded by many as an urban nuisance, or an outright threat. For some, the latest deadly episode is a reminder — like the fatal rooftop crash in 2019, or the crash over the East River in 2011, or a midair collision in 2009 — that there are hundreds of the crafts in the air every week, and restrictions on the industry have been limited.
From 2002 to 2013, there was a helicopter accident or fatality in the New York City metropolitan region about once every other year, said Andrew Rosenthal, the board president at Stop the Chop NY-NJ, a nonprofit group started in 2014 to end nonessential helicopter traffic.
“If we had a roller coaster that killed people every two years, on average,” he said, “how many decades would it continue to operate?”
The city controls two of the three heliports in Manhattan, while the third is run by a quasi-governmental trust in Hudson River Park. Around 70,000 commercial helicopter flights take off from the New York-New Jersey metro area a year, and more than half of those crafts are carrying tourists on short joy rides around New York City, Mr. Rosenthal said.
The busiest site for tourists, the Downtown Skyport, formerly known as the Downtown Manhattan Heliport, hosts about 27,000 tourist flights a year, according to the city’s Economic Development Corporation, the operator. The flight on Thursday departed from that heliport, ending with the deaths of Agustín Escobar, a Spanish executive for Siemens — one of the world’s largest companies — his wife, their three children and the pilot.
Non-tourist helicopter flights are primarily for trips that taxi wealthy clients to regional airports and the Hamptons. Based on air travel trackers, Mr. Rosenthal estimates that less than 5 percent of helicopter traffic is for essential services, like police work and medical emergencies.
The volume of traffic became more apparent during the coronavirus pandemic, when New Yorkers’ scorn for the aircrafts exploded. In 2019, before the pandemic normalized working from home, there were about 3,300 helicopter noise complaints reported to 311, the city’s help line. Last year, there were nearly 29,000. (Complaints peaked at nearly 60,000 in 2023, in part because critics of the industry created a short-lived application to help residents file grievances.)
Public pressure has led to some changes, but often only after a deadly accident. In 1977, a helicopter that was idling atop the Pan Am Building in Midtown Manhattan malfunctioned and sent a 20-foot helicopter blade tumbling 59 stories, killing five people. The rooftop landing pad was closed. More than a decade earlier, pilots had criticized the plan to open a helipad above Midtown.
In 1997, weeks after a helicopter owned by the Colgate-Palmolive company crashed into the East River, killing an executive, a surge of complaints moved Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to reduce the number of heliports in the city from four to three.
In 2016, at the urging of a number of groups fed up with helicopter noise, pollution and safety concerns, Mayor Bill de Blasio banned sightseeing helicopters from taking off on Sundays, and capped the annual number of tourist flights at the busiest heliport in the city to about 30,000, down from 60,000. But tourist helicopter operators in nearby Kearny and Linden in New Jersey aren’t bound by those restrictions.
The latest crash has already spurred calls to improve the city’s air space, which is, for the most part, controlled by the federal government. New York State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who represents western Manhattan, said that he is seeking a ban on sightseeing helicopters in the city.
“Manhattanites aren’t caged zoo creatures, and it’s offensive that we’re likened to a tourist site for the wealthy,” he said. Mr. Hoylman-Sigal signed legislation last year that would force a heliport in Hudson River Park to relocate, but it may continue to operate.
Supporters of the industry note that commercial helicopters contribute to the city’s tourism and tax revenue. A spokesman for the Economic Development Corporation said the city’s heliports employ about 175 workers and generate a “total economic impact” of $78 million a year. Critics say they’re not worth the cost, or the carbon emissions.
In response to calls for tighter regulation, the Eastern Region Helicopter Council, a trade group, said in a statement that “some well-meaning but misguided leaders are using this tragedy to exploit and push their decades-old agenda to ban all helicopters,” and that an investigation is needed before taking legislative action.
But there is more that city officials could do to reduce accidents and airspace congestion, critics of the copter industry said.
The city has the authority to end its license agreement with commercial helicopter operators at its two heliports, said Gale Brewer, a City Council member who has pushed to limit helicopter traffic since the Bloomberg administration. Her district includes the Upper West Side, where helicopters drone throughout the day. A number of bills that would restrict tourist and “commuter” helicopter rides have been introduced in the Council.
Melissa Elstein, the board chair at Stop the Chop, lives on the Upper West Side and said the latest accident is a wake-up call. And so was the last one. And the one before that.
“If this doesn’t stop this industry,” she said, “honestly, I don’t know what will.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Stefanos Chen is a Times reporter covering New York City’s transit system.
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