Jury Awards $116 Million to Family of Man Who Died in Helicopter Crash
The New York Times - September 19, 2024
BY CHRISTOPHER MAAG
When an open-door tourist helicopter crashed into the East River, Trevor Cadigan, 26, and four other passengers were unable to escape from cumbersome safety harnesses.
Five passengers died when a helicopter crashed into the East River in 2018. Mark Lennihan/Associated Press
The helicopter flight began with celebration. “All right — let’s do it!” the pilot shouted just before liftoff from the heliport in New Jersey.
“Party,” said one passenger. “Hooo!” said another.
After flybys of the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade Center and the Brooklyn Bridge, during which passengers leaned out the open door to shoot photos, the flight ended suddenly 14 minutes after takeoff when the red helicopter plunged into the East River. It tipped on its side, and as cold water flooded the cockpit, the passengers realized they could not escape.
“How do I cut this?” a passenger said, struggling to free himself from the harness that anchored him to the aircraft, according to the transcript of an onboard video from the flight released by the National Transportation Safety Board.
All five passengers died in the March 11, 2018, flight. Only the pilot escaped. The accident was caused by a loose, improvised safety harness that caught on the helicopter’s fuel shut-off lever, mounted on the floor. That activated the lever, killed the engine and caused the crash, the safety board found.
The safety harnesses, meant to prevent passengers from falling out the open door of the helicopter, instead locked the passengers in place, exposing them to “great difficulty extricating themselves” quickly in an emergency, the safety board found.
Six jurors in State Supreme Court in Manhattan agreed on Thursday, awarding $116 million in compensatory and punitive damages to family members of one of the passengers, Trevor Cadigan, 26.
The jury found that Liberty Helicopters, which owned the aircraft, and FlyNYON, which operated the helicopter for tours over New York City, were primarily responsible for the deaths.
Jurors also assigned some blame for the deaths to Dart Aerospace, maker of the helicopter’s emergency flotation system, which failed to fully inflate during the crash, causing the aircraft to flip on its side into the river.
“FlyNYON is contemplating next steps,” Anthony U. Battista, a lawyer for the company, said on Thursday, “and expresses its deepest condolences to the Cadigan family.”
Liberty Helicopters and Dart Aerospace did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.
Before the flight took off, the passengers were shown a safety video that lasted 3 minutes 22 seconds and covered topics including how to use headsets to communicate with the pilot and the location of the fire extinguisher. In an emergency, passengers were instructed to locate a knife concealed in a pocket of their safety harness and use it to cut themselves free, the safety board reported. Their harnesses also were attached to a locked carabiner, which they would need to locate and unscrew.
Expecting tourists to take all those steps at a moment of panic as they plunged upside-down into cold black water amounted to “a death sentence,” said Gary C. Robb, a lawyer for the Cadigan family.
The cutting tool also was found to be “ineffective” at cutting the harness, the safety board found.
Pilots had repeatedly raised concerns to FlyNYON’s management about the safety equipment — which was crafted from harnesses designed for construction workers, the N.T.S.B. found — including one pilot who warned that “we are setting ourselves up for failure.”
Company leaders rejected the pilots’ concerns and maintained that FlyNYON’s operations, which offered tourists the chance to lean out of the helicopter to take selfies over the city, were safe.
“Let me be clear, this isn’t a safety issue with the harnesses,” Patrick K. Day, the chief executive of FlyNYON, said in a January email, less than two months before the fatal flight.
Richard Vance, the pilot, was the sole person onboard who was wearing only a restraint approved by the Federal Aviation Administration that allowed him to escape with only minor injuries, the safety board found. The passengers, including Mr. Cadigan, wore the same restraint but were also strapped into the jury-rigged harnesses.
“He was doomed,” Mr. Robb said of Mr. Cadigan. “There’s no way he possibly could have escaped.”
After the crash, the F.A.A. temporarily barred helicopters from flying over New York without doors. A spokesman for the agency did not respond to questions about when or why the practice was subsequently allowed to continue. On its website, FlyNYON advertises doors-off flights for $165 per passenger, $40 more than a flight with the doors on.
In August, the F.A.A. issued a rule barring supplementary restraint systems unless operators meet new requirements for passenger and crew safety.
