A chilling video captured the final moments of a sightseeing helicopter as it spiraled into the Hudson River, killing all six people onboard.
The footage shared online shows the New York Helicopter tour chopper rapidly plummeting from the sky around 3:20PM on Thursday (April 10), slamming into the frigid waters with a massive splash.
Horrified witnesses watched in disbelief as the aircraft appeared to come apart midair - its tail and rotors snapping off before impact.
One of those witnesses, Charles McSorley, 59, was walking from Jersey City to Hoboken when he saw the disaster unfold in real time.
“Looked like the propellers came straight off. And I saw it come straight down,” the loading dock manager told The New York Post. “And I just started walking fast towards Hoboken because it wasn’t far from the Hoboken train station.”
He described a loud boom moments before the crash and said it seemed like the aircraft was “struggling all of a sudden".
“But you could literally see that the propeller just snapped right off. You can see it snap off, and then it just came straight down,” McSorley added.
All six people onboard - the pilot, Agustin Escobar, a top executive at Siemens Mobility, his wife, Merce Camprubi Montal, and their three children - were recovered from the water. Four died at the scene, while the other two succumbed to their injuries at the hospital.
The family had reportedly only just arrived from Barcelona earlier that day before boarding the ill-fated flight.
Pictures from the New York Helicopter Tours website show the family smiling in front of the chopper. Another heartbreaking image captures them buckled into their seats shortly before takeoff.
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez expressed his sorrow on X (formerly Twitter), calling the crash “devastating", adding: “The news reaching us today of the helicopter crash in the Hudson River is devastating.
“Five Spaniards from the same family, three of them children, and the pilot have lost their lives. An unimaginable tragedy. I share in the grief of the victims' loved ones at this heartbreaking time," he added.
One witness, Nicholas Bahamonde, 34, had a direct view of the tragedy from his Jersey City apartment during a work Zoom call.
“I look up to the left, and I saw the tail rotor break off of the helicopter, so it was already split in the air, and then the front main part of the helicopter started spiraling into the ocean,” Bahamonde told the outlet.
“I jumped up, and I said, ‘Oh my God, there’s a helicopter going down into the Hudson right now.’ And so I got off that and called 911, immediately. But I saw it. I saw it break apart, spiral, and crash-land into the water like, very clearly.”
Bruce Wall, another stunned bystander, said the chopper appeared to disintegrate mid-fall.
“Just walking toward this way from Hoboken and started just hearing something and then you look to the left into the water and you see the plane slowly falling apart,” Wall said. “It was falling apart probably 15 feet before it actually fell, and then the tail whipped off, and the propeller fell while it was falling, crashing. The propeller, as you see in the video, the propeller was in the air still propelling while the plane was falling down.”
An investigation is ongoing into what exactly caused the catastrophic failure mid-flight.