Sean Johnson, 36, a Navy SEAL veteran and former star companion, was the captain of the personal plane that crashed into the Hudson River on Thursday. Agustin Escober, a Siemens executive who traveled to New York from Barcelona to enjoy one of his children’s birthday, was one of the five members of the pilot’s family.
Johnson, who just relocated to New York City to pursue his aerospace profession, was operating a Bell 206 on Thursday as part of a five-person family’s Barcelona-to-Boston sightseeing trip. Prior to that, he resided in Montana, Virginia, and Illinois.
” I’m just at a loss for words,” I said. Kathryn Johnson, Johnson’s wife, said,” I don’t actually know what happened.”
According to his Instagram account, Johnson both attended Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University- Worldwide and Southern Utah University, where he studied business flying.
He posted a picture of himself inside a Bell 206 helicopter, which is the same unit he crashed on Thursday. When everything comes together,” Sean wrote as the title to express his desire to travel. Whether or not it was the exact copter that crashed remains a mystery.
How did the aircraft collide?
Johnson called the basic moments before the fall and said he was returning to find fuel, despite not knowing the exact cause of the crash. Following a well-known tour way, the aircraft took off at 2:59 p.m. from Manhattan’s city heliport. It circled the Statue of Liberty before turning west along the New Jersey shore, where it lost power shortly after, heading north along the Hudson River until it reached the George Washington Bridge by 3:08 p.m. Many 911 calls in Hoboken, New Jersey, reported a crash at 3:17 p.m. Witnesses claimed that the aircraft appeared to be in flight before the pieces started to fall.
The private owner of the aircraft did not comment on how the helicopter was maintained, nor how gas was only available after 15 minutes of flight.