A Manhattan helicopter tour turned into a ride of horror for a group of sightseers when the chopper crashed into the Hudson yesterday afternoon.
All eight people on board jumped into the water after the wayward whirlybird went down. They were safely rescued after about five minutes by some weekend mariners in passing pleasure boats, authorities said.
The Liberty Tours chopper, a Eurocopter EC-135 that took off from West 30th Street at 4:50 p.m., was able to make a controlled landing then stay afloat using emergency inflatable pontoons.
The eight were taken to the Pier 83 Circle Line terminal at West 42nd Street.
Fire Department EMT José Mejia, 21, happened to be on the helicopter – the 10-minute tour was a fourth-anniversary gift from his girlfriend – and helped other passengers unbuckle their seat belts and don their lifejackets.
“I was scared for dear life – I thought this was the way I was going to go,” said Mejia, who doesn’t know how to swim.
“The pilot was amazing, she really deserves my utmost praise.”
He said that the engine was making loud, strange noises before they went down.
“I believe engine failure is what I heard the pilot say,” said Mejia, of Flushing, Queens. “We went straight into the water.”
His girlfriend, Zaira Machado, shivering and wrapped in an FDNY jacket at the Circle Line terminal, also said she was terrified.
“It was scary, because I don’t know how to swim, either,” she said.
Witnesses across the river saw the crash unfold.
“We heard a really loud, bad sound, like a helicopter coming apart,” said Doug Munro, 53, who was sitting on his porch in Weehawken, N.J., at about 5 p.m. when the chopper went down.
“It looked like the pilot was trying to make it to the heliport [in Manhattan] then it looked like he was trying to make it to this side,” said Munro. “You could tell she wasn’t going to make it. The thing was coming down fast, making a lot of noise.”
“We looked up and saw smoke coming out of the back of it. It just dropped in the water,” said Chef Paul Luftus at the Petey O’Hurley’s restaurant on the pier. “It stayed afloat a couple of minutes, then the front of it sank. The tail could be seen sticking out of the water for a while.”
The National Transportation Safety Board in Washington said it had reached no preliminary conclusions.
“We’re sending an investigator,” said NTSB spokesman Ted Lopatkiewicz.
The helicopter was secured to a New Jersey pier, the Coast Guard said.
Liberty Tours has had at least two notable crashes in the past.
In 1998, one of its helicopters crashed into a terminal building at its West 30th Street heliport and three people sustained minor injuries. Five other passengers were unhurt.
Three years earlier, a Liberty Tours pilot testified to the NTSB that he was forced to fly after asking to be “relieved from the mission,” then forgot to untie the rotor blades, causing a crash shortly after he tried to take off.
Liberty Tours refused to comment on yesterday’s crash.
Additional reporting by Wynn Parry and Hasani Gittens