The flight was operated by Liberty Helicopters under contract with FlyNYON, a company that marketed open-door aerial photography experiences over New York City. Passengers sat with their legs dangling above the skyline, capturing Instagram-ready shots through the doorless fuselage. Liberty had spent $120,000 lobbying city officials in 2015, and the company classified its flights as aerial photography to qualify for regulatory exemptions. The supplemental harnesses passengers wore were not aviation-grade -- they were yellow nylon fall-protection harnesses designed for construction workers, modified with zip ties to fit smaller passengers. Pilots had been requesting better equipment for months. They preferred a more expensive blue harness that was FAA-certified for helicopter operations, with more accessible release points. FlyNYON staff applied masking tape -- which they branded as "NYON blue safety tape" -- to prevent accidental release. The irony would prove fatal: a system designed to prevent passengers from falling out made it impossible for them to get out.

The pilot briefed each passenger before takeoff, locking their harness tethers to the helicopter and showing them where to find the cutting tool attached to each harness. During the climb, he noticed the front passenger had unfastened his primary seatbelt and reminded him to keep it secured. Then came the low rotor RPM alarm. Warning lights flashed for low engine and fuel pressure. The NTSB would later determine that a passenger's harness strap had snagged the emergency fuel shutoff lever -- a known design vulnerability that Airbus had identified years earlier but the FAA had never required be fixed. The pilot considered an emergency landing in Central Park but judged it too crowded. At 7:06 p.m., he turned toward the East River and began an autorotative descent, successfully ditching the helicopter in a survivable landing. But the aircraft rolled over and began to sink. The pilot, wearing only a standard seatbelt, freed himself and surfaced. The five passengers could not.

The NTSB investigation revealed a cascade of ignored warnings. Eight years before the crash, in 2010, the board had flagged the AS350's fuel shutoff lever as dangerously accessible. Airbus developed a redesigned guard, but the FAA never mandated a retrofit. Liberty's own pilots had formally requested better harnesses and quicker-release cutting tools for two months before the fatal flight. The emergency flotation system, manufactured by Dart Aerospace, also failed -- only one of its two reservoir assemblies activated, causing the helicopter to flip rather than float upright. Twelve scholars who peer-reviewed the NTSB report raised concerns about systemic failures in the doors-off sightseeing industry. In September 2024, a jury awarded $116 million to the family of one victim, apportioning liability among FlyNYON (42 percent), Liberty Helicopters (38 percent), and Dart Aerospace (20 percent).

The FAA moved quickly after the crash. On March 23, 2018, it issued an emergency prohibition on doors-off passenger flights using supplemental restraint systems unless those systems had FAA approval. The ban was renewed the following year. The NTSB's final report, adopted in December 2019, concluded starkly: the pilot had done everything right, executing a survivable autorotation into the water. The passengers died because a commercial operation had strapped paying customers into construction-worker harnesses and sent them flying over one of the world's largest cities with no viable means of escape. The crash was not the first for Liberty Helicopters -- the company had been involved in two other incidents over the preceding eleven years. For the five people who climbed aboard that evening, the promise of a once-in-a-lifetime view of Manhattan became exactly that.