Summary
A tourist helicopter carrying a Spanish family of five and a pilot crashed into the Hudson River near Lower Manhattan, killing all 6 aboard, including 3 children.
The Bell 206 helicopter plunged into the water inverted, missing its rotor blades, just over 15 minutes after departing the Wall St. Heliport.
Witnesses described loud noises and parts falling off before impact.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating, and Jersey City officials renewed calls for tighter air traffic safety.
Yeah, parts were falling off when it came doen but that’s helicopters for you, always just on the cusp of not exploding.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing technology, they’re relatively safe, and there are uncountable uses for them, but fuck are they are the limits of practical engineering . When something goes wrong, IT GOES WRONG. Best you can hope for is auto rotation to the ground
Wait, was this because of that penguin?
No, that was in South Africa.
Agustin Escobar, an executive from European automation company Siemens, his wife, Merce Camprubi Montal, and their children
I feel bad only for the kids. The parents were rich leeches who were getting rich from putting poor people out of work.
an executive from European automation company Siemens . . . rich leeches who were getting rich from putting poor people out of work.
Are you saying that automation is a bad thing? Like, categorically?
Automation does reduce the number of people needed for some tasks, but in a way that improves dramatically the lives of those still doing those tasks.
I would much rather have automated storage and retrieval systems bring powering a goods-to-person station rather than making people run up and down shelves to retrieve stuff people ordered like we used to have. We used to hear horror stories of Amazon workers not being able to go use the restroom because they couldn’t keep up with quotas. Now robots bring the shelves to them, making the job significantly easier and reducing stress. Obviously reduction of quotas or hiring more workers could also have worked, but this way throughout remains high without the insane amount of burnout for human beings.
I would rather see conveyor systems bringing those picked goods to other stations in the warehouse rather than a person having to run or drive those goods from place to place. I’d rather see automatic sortation systems shuttle totes to their proper destinations than have a person have to take them individually from a source to destination conveyors.
Automation isn’t bad. Stymying advances in automation to protect jobs purely for the sake of the jobs is akin to breaking windows so the window makers have work.
The real issues arise because in most countries few people reap the full benefits. That issue isn’t because of automation, but because of our faulty systems.
Ah the efficiency
The dwarf epileptic amputee air traffic controller can’t be blamed this time: they’ve all been fired.
It’s almost like helicopters are dangerous and you shouldn’t be in one unless you really need to.
They’re only dangerous of their poorly maintained… like any aircraft.
I mean, their design is dangerous compared to an airplane, which had multiple redundancies and a glide ratio
Autorotation.
Like any tool, they’re not dangerous unless improperly maintained or piloted. I can virtually guarantee you, this will come down to either a guilty mechanic (or policies governing mechanic activities) or a guilty pilot. This is not a consequence of “helicopters are fundamentally unsafe vehicles, unfit for tourist consumption.” Laughable.
Like almost every other mode of transportation, flying in a helicopter is considerably more dangerous than airline travel. But it’s far safer than riding in a car.
Helicopter travel is, using our metric, slightly more dangerous than mass transit, but we can broadly say they’re in the same safety band.
There’s video of blades falling down separately from the helicopter falling without blades on
That’s not good. It’s my understanding that the blades are typically meant to stay attached.
Okay, got my guilty laugh of the day out of the way. Thanks.
Just a hunch
2 helicopter crashes today. I hope we hear the cause of this one
The video on this one was so weird, like the transmission suddenly and violently locked up, snapping all the prop blades in half.
Where did you see a video?
This article includes a better video of the crash. The body of the craft hits and then you can see the main propeller fall into the water afterwords. One theory is that the main blade somehow separated in flight and actually cut off the tail rotor.
A Telegram news channel: https://t.me/bnonews/3864
It’s a distant shot and the moment of impact is obscured from view, but you can clearly see chunks of propeller blades spinning through the air while the remnants still attached to the helicopter don’t appear to rotate at all.
Edit: Oh wait, it lands upside down so those are the skids. Duh.
Holy shit, they came down fuckin hard 😮
Tragic. A family on vacation with three kids.
I took one of those tours when I spent a week in NYC. Definitely wouldn’t do the same now.
Agustin Escobar, an executive from European automation company Siemens, his wife, Merce Camprubi Montal, and their children
I feel bad only for the kids. The parents were rich leeches who were getting rich from putting poor people out of work.
Siemens also makes high speed electric trains and some of the most reliable car chargers.
Getting mad at a company that automates away meneal jobs because capitalism forces people to depend on doing shit work for the rich in order to eat is kinda short sighted imo.
Like yeah, if everything had to be done by hand it would put more money into the hands of the working class, but it would also make it harder for them to afford a decent lifestyle because everything would be more expensive; automation offers the potential for everyone to live better, we’re just using it in a system that privatizes the gains into a small pool of wealthy owners.
Tighten your Jesus nut
Don’t forget the tie wire…
Yea, somebody missed a step, and someone else did too.
I have family/friends in different parts of the aeronautical world - the procedures, documentation, sign-offs, and oversight is staggering, regardless of which area: A&P maintenance, refurb, , commercial/private/military, research/experimental, etc.
But luckily all those pesky regulashuns are getting cut now.
