Lionel Carles and his wife and young son arrived from Nice, France, on Wednesday with a list of things to see and do in New York City: St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Rockefeller Center, Top of the Rock, Fifth Avenue. And, an exciting highlight — a helicopter tour of the skyline.
Rafn Herlufsen, visiting from Iceland with his teenage son, made similar plans: a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday, a helicopter tour later in the week.
And Agustín Escobar, a Spanish executive with the technology giant Siemens, bought one of the longer flights offered by the tour company, New York Helicopter. Five tickets, for himself, his wife and their three children for a trip that would last 20 minutes and include a George Washington Bridge flyover.
Each family arrived at their assigned time on Thursday at a helipad near the South Street Seaport for their flight with New York Helicopter. They listened to safety briefings and posed for photographs in front of the chopper they flew that day, tail number N216MH.
By day’s end, that helicopter would come apart in the sky and crash into the Hudson River, and one of those families would be killed, along with their pilot.
The other two families would — stoically, awkwardly — tour the city, putting on happy faces while coming to grips with their own very, very close calls.
An aerial tour along New York’s famous skyline may be a visitor’s once-in-a-lifetime thrill. But for a helicopter pilot, it is just another lap around a familiar track. Pilots had traced this path in this aircraft more than 1,600 times.
The helicopter flown by those visiting families on Thursday was a Bell 206 LongRanger that had spent two years making short- and medium-haul flights all over Texas: Dallas to Lancaster, Austin to Denton, Denton to Wichita Falls.
In November 2019, the helicopter arrived in New York City. Since then, it had logged over 2,600 hours in the air, most of it in segments of 10 or 15 minutes, hustling tourists up and down the Hudson River.
The flights began or ended at the Downtown Manhattan Heliport in Lower Manhattan near the seaport. A standard trip took passengers around the heel of the island, over to the Statue of Liberty, up the Hudson for a few miles, then back.
The helicopter made the circuit over and over, as often as 18 times a day, with as little as three minutes between flights — barely time for the next smiling group to pose for a photo. Around the bottom, over the statue, up the river and back; around, over, up, back.
The members of the French family — Mr. Carles, 54; his wife, Alexandra, 46; and their son, César, 7 — were ready for takeoff. The helicopter rose, and they all laughed, exhilarated. They soared over New York and the minutes raced by.
“It’s a wonderful experience,” said Mr. Carles, a lawyer. “It’s one of the attractions, for us, that stands out when you’re in New York.”
For the father and son from Iceland, the trip was a celebratory one. The 14-year-old had recently completed a confirmation ritual that is a milestone in their home country. They are both big basketball fans, and they had seats at a close game Tuesday night, the Celtics beating the Knicks 119 to 117 in overtime.
They had “a huge itinerary of New York things,” Mr. Herlufsen said. Thursday was the helicopter flight, Mr. Herlufsen’s second with the touring company, and the boy’s first.
Beneath sunny skies, they soared over the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and One World Trade Center.
“I love the city,” Mr. Herlufsen said.
It was almost 3 p.m. The Escobar family arrived at the helipad. They smiled broadly for the photos the company took — Mr. Escobar, Mercè Camprubí Montal and their three children — Agustín, 10, Mercè, 8, and Víctor, 4.
They met their pilot, Seankese Johnson, 36, who had flown helicopters since August 2023. He had been working for New York Helicopter for only a few weeks.
They took off toward Lady Liberty, then up the West Side of Manhattan.
After flying over the majestic span of the George Washington Bridge, the pilot banked and headed downriver along the New Jersey side of the Hudson.
It was 3:09 p.m. The helicopter held its altitude of 1,100 feet and was heading south at 90 miles per hour, according to a data log on the flight-tracking site FlightAware. Yankee Stadium came into view on the left, then Grant’s Tomb.
It was 3:11. The helicopter — hugging the shore above Edgewater, N.J., across the river from the top of Central Park — began its usual descent back to the heliport. Normally, the descent is gradual. This one was not. In 51 seconds, the craft lost more than 500 feet.
It was 3:12. Off on the left, the residential Manhattan skyscrapers of West 57th Street, Billionaires’ Row, were now higher than the helicopter. The chopper appears to have climbed at one point as Mr. Johnson struggled to regain control.
It is unclear, until more details emerge, what was happening inside the craft at this point — what the pilot was relaying to the ground, whether the family was panicked, confused, terrified.
Beneath the helicopter, the river loomed closer. Passers-by in Jersey City said they heard a loud bang, and turned to see black smoke pouring from an aircraft overhead.
At 3:15, just off a pier in Jersey City’s waterfront Newport neighborhood, the helicopter dropped like a stone from the sky, parts flying off, flipping over as it fell. It plunged into the river.
The radios that pilots use to communicate with air control squawked out updates.
“Be advised, you do have an aircraft down, Holland Tunnel,” an air controller said with brisk urgency. “Please keep your eyes open for anybody in the water.”
It had been less than 30 minutes since the family smiled for the camera. No one survived. Their pilot, Mr. Johnson, a U.S. Navy veteran, was also killed.
Somewhere else in Manhattan, Mr. Carles, the French lawyer, got a text from a co-worker. “Did you know about this crash?”
He pulled up a news story, setting off a cascade of recognition.
This happened right after we left.
This was the same company we used.
And then, squinting at pictures of the Escobar family posing in front of the machine and comparing them with their own photos. This was the same helicopter.
“There’s no doubt about it,” Mr. Carles said.
The group forged ahead with the vacation — a basketball game, a visit to the 9/11 Memorial. They didn’t speak about the helicopter, even as happy photos from the trip — a son smiling beside the pilot — were saved in their phones.
“We drop the subject,” Mr. Carles said. “We talk about something PG. We continue our vacation. We are very happy to be safe and sound, and we move on.”
Hours after Mr. Herlufsen left the helipad with his son, his phone blew up. He too realized they’d been in the same flying machine.
His son had been especially shaken by the ordeal. “This is such a brush with mortality, difficult to parse at 14,” Mr. Herlufsen said.
But the boy’s father hoped to end their trip on a positive note.
“We have one more day left of our New York stay,” he said on Thursday, “and I’m really trying not to have this overwhelm our ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ adventure trip.”
The extended members of Mr. Escobar’s and Ms. Camprubí’s families sought words of comfort after the massive loss.
“They have passed away together, leaving an indelible mark on all their relatives, friends and acquaintances,” the families said in a statement.
For those relatives, the week ended with an unthinkable task, flying to New York, to return the five bodies to Spain.
