Pilot error caused an October 2011 East River helicopter crash that killed three overseas visitors, the National Transportation Safety Board said today.
Probers found that the Bell Ranger chopper was as much as 261 pounds too heavy when it lifted off from the East 34th Street Heliport, and say pilot Paul Dudley underestimated his passengers’ weights.
Dudley’s miscalculations led to a phenomenon called “loss of tail rotor effectiveness,” which caused the chopper to spin out of control and crash.
Dudley, the manager of Linden Airport in New Jersey, disputes the NTSB findings.
“We strongly disagree with the conclusions in the report, which are based on conjecture and estimates and that lead to questionable conclusions,” he said.
“You don’t go 30 years of flying without an accident by being careless.”
In 2006, Dudley made an emergency landing of a Cessna 172 in Calvert Vaux Park in Brooklyn.
The chopper crash victims were Helen Tamaki, 43 and her partner Sonia Marra, 40, both of Sydney, Australia, and Marra’s mother, Harriet Nicholson, 60, a British national who lived in Portugal.
Nicholson’s husband Paul and Dudley both survived without serious injury.