Tale of two rotors

Eerie similarity between this week's helicopter crash and one that happened in 1989 involving Trump executives

On a sunny afternoon on October 10th, 1989, three business executives boarded an Agusta A 109A helicopter for a quick trip from Manhattan to Atlantic City. The flight did not reach its destination, however, as it experienced a catastrophic main rotor failure and crashed in the wooded median of the Garden State Parkway near mile-marker 71.5 around 1:50 PM. All five men aboard the craft were instantly killed.

Investigators immediately discovered that the main rotor had completely separated from the chopper. It was finally located a few days later about a quarter-mile away from the crash site. A subsequent investigation of the rotor concluded in 1991 that the rotor had failed due to a tiny scratch 2 inches long and 1/100 of an inch deep on one of the blades. It’s not clear to me how the experts responsible for analyzing the mangled rotor would have been able to distinguish mechanical scratches introduced to the blades prior to the crash from those caused by the accident itself.

The truth is main rotor separation from a helicopter is an extremely rare event. In fact, a spokesman for the FAA even went so far as to say “this is a most unusual type of malfunction for a helicopter”, and further stated “the people I’ve talked to have not heard of this happening before” in reference to this particular crash. Other aviation experts also commented at the time of the “highly unusual” nature of the crash.

Why do I bring this up?

This week, on April 10th, a helicopter carrying a family of five crashed into the Hudson River in dramatic fashion after losing its main rotor. Michael Roth is the owner of the company which provided the chopper tour. After the crash, he was quoted as saying:

The only thing I know by watching a video of the helicopter falling down, that the main rotor blades weren’t on the helicopter. And I haven’t seen anything like that in my 30 years being in business.

Two extremely rare main rotor failures in two crashes separated by three decades and six months. Ok, so what, rare things DO happen from time to time. But, still, there is something else bugging me about this.

Those three business executives who died in the 1989 crash, they weren’t just your average, unremarkable executives - they all happened to work for Donald Trump. Stephen Hyde, 43, was chief executive officer of Trump’s Atlantic City casino operations; Mark Etess, 38, was president of the Taj Mahal casino project; and Jonathan Benanav, 33, was president of Trump Plaza casino hotel. This was the upper echelon of Trump’s management team and they were all wiped out at the same moment. Trump even released a statement through his spokesman after the crash saying that he himself was originally planning to take the trip along with the other three on the same chopper:

He really doesn’t want to talk about it, but he was going to go to Atlantic City and he did change his mind.

Did he really intend to get on that chopper? If so, did someone whisper in his ear that he should not?

It’s quite interesting to consider the broader context of events occurring around Donald Trump at the time of the crash. Less than a year later, he would have divorced Ivana and seen his empire crash and burn. It seems to me that the chopper crash may have been a fatal blow to Trump’s already struggling business ventures. If you were an enemy of Trump and wanted to bring him completely under your control, arranging a crash to decapitate his executive leadership certainly seems like the right move to make.

I have no idea if there is any connection at all between the 1989 crash and the one that occurred this week. These coincidences certainly make one think, though.