A Houdini could have survived it

YOU’D HAVE to be renowned escape artist to have gotten out of the doomed helicopter tour that crashed into the East River Sunday and killed five people, experts said.

Hard-to-reach safety harnesses, poor safety training and open chopper doors created a deadly configuration for even the most experienced fliers.

“When you have an open door, and those harnesses, you have an inescapable scenario,” helicopter crash lawyer Gary Robb said. “You’d have to be Houdini to escape. There’s no real prospect of safely evacuating an aircraft in that situation.”

FlyNYOn, the company that charter the flight, touts their air tours a safe and thrilling ride with a bird’s-eye view of downtown Manhattan’s biggest tourist attractions.

“We take the thrill of shooting images from an open door helicopter . . . without compromising safety,” according to the company’s website. Flying without doors is legal.

The company promotes their “rigorously maintained jet-engine helicopters featuring redundancies in seat belts, harnesses, floatation devices, and/or dual engines.”

Now National Transportation Safety Board investigators are probing whether the chopper’s safety floats deployed properly and the harnesses functioned properly.

“There are some issues with the floats,” Robb said. “The river didn’t look too rough. It shouldn’t have been a problem keeping the helicopter upright.”

Writer/photographer Eric Adams, who took the same tour on Sunday, said that there wasn’t proper evacuation training provided by the tour company.

He said they showed safety film that explained the safety measures.

“They showed us the harness and how it worked, and they showed us the knife and how you’d have to cut yourself free,” Adams said. The knife consisted of a plastic hook covered on three sides by plastic and an opening to slide the belt strap into to cut it.

“They didn’t really show me where the knife was,” he said.

He said that the harness fit through the legs and over the shoulders. It had a carabiner attached to a loop in the center of the passenger’s back. That carabiner was then tethered to the helicopter.

“You’d have to reach behind you, open the carabiner to get yourself free,” Adams said. “They don’t really walk you through the release during the safety briefing.”

FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro said the rescue was hampered because the passengers were tightly harnessed. “People had to be cut out,” he said.

Pilot Richard Vance, 33, was able to deploy a raft and get himself to safety after the 7 p.m. crash Sunday.