Federal investigators stated that the helicopter which was drowned in the Hudson River on Thursday and killed all six people, was on a trip to the eighth sightseeing of the day and lacking a flight data recorder, said federal investigators.
The National Transportation Safety Board on Saturday said in an investigative update that Bel 206 L -4 helicopter had completed seven flights. The aircraft was not equipped with a cockpit voice recorder or flight data recorder, and no onboard video or camera device has been recovered, it has been said.
The last major inspection of the aircraft was on 1 March. The Siemens AG was taking a senior executive, his wife and three children as passengers when it crashed near Jersey City, New Jersey.
The divers of the New York City Police Department are still searching for the river for important components, including the main rotor, tail rotor, main gearbox and a large part of the tail boom. The NTSB stated that the scanning is using Sonar to identify possible places of debris and recovery operation.
NTSB stated that cockpit, cabin, parts of the tail boom, vertical fin and horizontal stabilizer finalelets have been recovered. Some of those components will be sent to NTSB laboratories in Washington for near inspection, and investigators have begun to evaluate the flight control system in a safe feature.
The pilot had logged out of the 788 total flight hours by the end of March, although NTSB is still working to determine how many of those hours were in 206 models.
Investigators have met with representatives of the tour operator, New York Helicopter Charter Inc., and reviewed the operational policies, security protocols and maintenance records. He also investigated two identical helicopters as part of the ongoing investigation.
The accident adds a disturbed safety to the New York helicopter to the history. In 2013, one of the company’s aircraft made an emergency landing in Hudson due to the engine failure – later attributed to the “improper maintenance decisions” by NTSB. In 2015, another event included a difficult landing on the reuse of a “unnatural” component in another event.
The New York helicopter was filed for bankruptcy in 2019 after tightening the helicopter traffic on Manhattan. After the latest accident, CEO Michael Roth said that the company is “sad for what happened is sad” and is collaborating with investigators.
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