The recent fatal crash of a news helicopter from ABC’s Philadelphia station is putting a spotlight on the dangers news crews face. According to reports, pilot Monroe Smith and photographer Christopher Dougherty were the only two on board when the chopper went down in Washington Township, New Jersey, killing both.
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State police discovered the wreckage the early morning of Wednesday, Dec. 20.
The helicopter was a 2013 American Eurocopter AS-350A-STAR, which the station leases from the North Carolina-based company U.S. Helicopters Incorporated.
The National Transportation Safety Board is leading the investigation.
“Now what my team and I will be doing is we’re going to be on scene for about the next three days,” Todd Gunther, the NTSB Investigator-in-charge said in a press conference on Thursday, Dec. 21. “We’ll be looking at what we call the ‘man- machine-environmental interface,’ and we’ll be looking at anything that may have affected the accident flight or may have been causal.”
The crash of the Philadelphia news chopper is one of several the NTSB has investigated in just the past couple of decades, with the agency determining various causes for the incidents.
In May 2004, a helicopter with New York’s WNBC station was covering a triple shooting in Brooklyn when it spun out of control and crashed onto the roof of an apartment building. In this case, the pilot and a reporter on board survived but suffered serious injuries.
The NTSB concluded a loss in the chopper’s hydraulic system problem led to the crash.
In July 2007, two helicopters from competing stations collided while covering a police chase in Phoenix. Two pilots and two photographers were killed.
The NTSB determined the probable cause was both pilots failing to see and avoid one another.
In March 2014, a pilot and a news photographer were killed when moments after their chopper lifted from the roof of a Seattle station, it struck two cars and burst into flames.
The cause was a loss of hydraulic boost to the tail rotor and main rotor controls, according to the NTSB.
In September 2017, a veteran TV reporter at an Albuquerque New Mexico station died after the helicopter he was piloting crashed. The NTSB investigation suggested the pilot may have been distracted during the flight.
Last November, a pilot and a meteorologist from a Charlottle NBC affiliate were killed when their helicopter crashed near I-77.
The local police chief said the pilot was a hero after witnesses saw him seem to maneuver the plane from crashing into the highway.
According to the NTSB, the pilot was training the meteorologist in a simulated news scene at the time.
The NTSB said it will release a preliminary report on the Philadelphia news helicopter fatal crash within the next 10 days, with a final report coming around 18 months later.
