NEW YORK — The National Transportation Safety Board has released the preliminary report on the crash of a helicopter earlier in the month.

Five people died after the helicopter they were passengers on went down March 11 in New York’s East River.

Three of the passengers had been taken to hospital with critical injuries after surviving the crash. Two others were killed in the crash.

A sixth person, the pilot, was able to free himself and was rescued.

Officials said, “The preliminary report summarizes the preflight activities, passenger briefing and the sequence of events leading up to the accident as described by the pilot during a post-accident interview.”

The preliminary report is available online here. </s> Federal investigators on Saturday (May 4) began searching for what caused a Boeing jetliner with 143 people on board to slide off a runway into a shallow river while landing at a Jacksonville, Florida, military base during a thunderstorm, injuring 22 people.

The Boeing 737-800 chartered by the U.S. military was arriving from Naval Station Guantanamo Bay in Cuba with 136 passengers and seven crew members when it slid into the St. Johns River at the end of the 9,000-foot runway at Naval Air Station Jacksonville on Friday night, authorities said.

Officials raised the count of people injured to 22, from 21, after a three-month-old child was admitted to a local hospital for observation, Captain Michael Connor, commanding officer at the Jacksonville station, told a news conference.

National Transportation Safety Board investigators have recovered an undamaged flight data recorder and it has been sent to Washington for analysis, NTSB Vice Chairman Bruce Landsberg said at the news conference.

"We expect to get a very full report on that shortly," he said.

Investigators said they are hoping to interview the crew on Sunday.

The cockpit voice recorder is in the tail of the plane and submerged underwater. Investigators will not be able to recover it until the aircraft is lifted out of the water, Landsberg said.

"We are going to be very careful in preserving the perishable evidence," he said.

Officials were determining the best way to remove the plane from the water, NTSB investigator in charge John Lovell said.

"There are some ideas being floated in terms of putting some sort of cushioning below it ... and moving it on those cushions," he said.

The U.S. Coast Guard placed floating booms around the jetliner to contain leaking jet fuel in the water, Landsberg said.

The plane, chartered from Miami Air International, was attempting to land at about 9:40 p.m. local time amid thunder and lightning when it slid off the runway and came to rest in the shallow water of the river, authorities and passengers said.

Landsberg said investigators will look closely at whether the weather played a role in the incident.

"It is a miracle. We could be talking about a different story," Connor said early on Saturday.

Active duty military members, civilian government employees and their dependents were on the jetliner, Connor told CNN.

The military base is on the western bank of the St. Johns River about 8 miles (12.87 km) south of central Jacksonville, about 350 miles (563.27 km) north of Miami.

Miami Air International is a charter airline operating a fleet of the Boeing 737-800, different from the 737 MAX 8 aircraft that has been grounded following two fatal crashes involving that plane.

Representatives of the airline did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

A spokesman for Boeing Co said that the company was aware of the incident and gathering information.

The charter company is contracted by the military for its twice-weekly "rotator" round-trip service between the U.S. mainland and Guantanamo Bay, said Bill Dougherty, a spokesman for the Jacksonville base. </s> iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — Two people were killed when a private helicopter crashed into the East River Sunday evening, authorities said.

The red Eurocopter AS350 helicopter was carrying six passengers when it went down, police sources said. One of the passengers was seriously injured after being pulled from the water, sources said.

A bystander captured the helicopter’s descent into the water on video. The footage shows the final seconds as the chopper’s propellers strike the glassy river’s surface, its engine sputtering.

The helicopter hit the cold water at East 96th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side neighborhood about 7 p.m., local and federal authorities later confirmed.

The pilot who was experiencing engine failure, sources said.

The Federal Aviation Administration tweeted that it was investigating the crash and added that the helicopter is “reportedly inverted in the water.” It added that the National Transportation Safety Board would lead the investigation.

New York City’s NYPD and FDNY confirmed that there were sending emergency personnel into the area near East 90th Street in Manhattan.
The US National Transportation Safety Board releases a preliminary investigative report containing new information on the accident, in which five passengers drowned when they were trapped in the wreckage.