One year after a tourist helicopter plunged from the sky into the Hudson River, killing a family of five and the pilot, New York legislators on Thursday proposed a bill that would require such helicopters to meet the same rigorous safety standards as commercial airplanes.
Speaking at a news conference on Manhattan’s West Side waterfront, Representative Jerrold Nadler called on Congress to pass the bill, the Helicopter Safety Parity Act, which he said would close a regulatory loophole that allowed lower safety standards to apply to sightseeing helicopters.
“The bill puts forth a simple notion: Helicopters should be held to the same safety standards as airplanes,” said Mr. Nadler, a Democrat, as he stood on a pier near where the sightseeing helicopter fell into the river on April 10, 2025. “Such a notion is common sense and it’s time for our laws and regulators to catch up.”
The deadly crash led to calls for more restrictions on tourist helicopters. It was the third fatal crash in New York’s helicopter tour industry in the last two decades and the most deadly in the past seven years.
The proposed bipartisan bill, which is also sponsored by Representative Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican, would require helicopters carrying fare-paying passengers to undergo more rigid maintenance routines and have modern safety features such as cockpit-voice and flight-data recorders. The law would also set aside $50 million annually for oversight, inspections and enforcement.
Every year, tens of thousands of tourist helicopters depart from heliports in and around New York City. The tour companies advertise the chance to see many of the city’s famed sights — Central Park, One World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty — in as little as 15 minutes. Many of the helicopters take off and land in the same spot, which allows the flights to be held to lower safety standards — a loophole Mr. Nadler and Ms. Malliotakis hope to close.
“For too long, sightseeing helicopter operators have exploited regulatory gaps to operate under lower safety standards than other passenger aircraft, and that is unacceptable,” Ms. Malliotakis said in a statement.
On the afternoon of April 10, a Bell 206L-4 LongRanger operated by New York Helicopter Tours took off from a heliport in Lower Manhattan, circled near the Statue of Liberty and headed north up the Hudson to the George Washington Bridge. The aircraft had made a U-turn close to the bridge and was heading back on the New Jersey side of the river when it suddenly broke into three pieces and fell into the water, according to a preliminary report released by the National Transportation Safety Board in May 2025. The final report is still pending.
The helicopter’s passengers, all of whom died, were Agustín Escobar Cañadas, 49, a Spanish executive with the technology giant Siemens; his wife, Mercè Camprubí Montal, 39; and their three children, Agustín, 10; Mercè, 8; and Víctor, 4. The pilot, Seankese Johnson, 36, a U.S. Navy veteran who had recently started flying for the tour company, also died.
The helicopter, with tail number N216MH, had shepherded tourists at least 2,000 times up the Hudson since it arrived in New York in November 2019. The chopper had made the trip as often as 18 times a day, with as little as three minutes between tours.
On its final flight, it spent about 13 minutes in the air, before its fuselage, main rotor system and tail boom split apart, according to the preliminary report.
On Thursday, 11 surviving members of the family stood alongside Mr. Nadler and other lawmakers at the news conference. Joan Camprubí Montal, the brother of Ms. Camprubí Montal, urged Congress to pass the legislation in the name of his sister, her husband and their three young children.
“No other family should have to experience the loss that we as a family experienced,” he said, pointing at a photo propped up on an easel. The picture — one of the last they would take — showed the family of five smiling with Times Square behind them.
“For us this is personal,” Mr. Camprubí Montal said. “We want to keep their memories alive and the best way to do that is to strengthen the safety standards.”
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