Gal a ‘fasten’ victim
Says seat belt came undone in tragic helicopter
A tourist who flew on the exact same helicopter that fatally crashed in the East River on Sunday says her seat belt came undone mid-flight as her legs dangled over the side — and the company tried to blame her for the safety failure.
“I remember thinking, ‘God, if my buckle can come undone that easily, what else haven’t they checked?’ ” Benedicte Earl, 25, of London, told The Post on Tuesday.
Earl had booked one of FlyNYON’s open-door tours of the city — for which passengers sit in the doorway and snap photos — as a celebration for her boyfriend’s 30th birthday in November 2017.
They were assigned to Liberty Helicopters’ N350LH, the same chopper that plummeted into the river Sunday night, killing five passengers.
Earl and her beau were harnessed to the plane in addition to wearing regular seat belts, but Earl says her “heart dropped” when she looked down and saw her belt flapping about freely in the wind.
When she told the pilot, she says he blamed her.
“He said, ‘I told you not to take it off ’ to which I replied, ‘I didn’t! It unbuckled itself.’ And was quite panicked,” she later wrote in an email to the company. “He said not to try to put it back on but to hold the straps so they didn’t hit my boyfriend in the head.”
The operator’s customer-service agent also tried to point the finger at her, Earl recalled.
“Now, did it come off on its own? It’s very hard for the seat belt to come off on its own along with the shoulder straps that held you in. Perhaps you clicked it accidentally,” manager Hussein Elmaksoud wrote to her, e-mails shared with The Post show.
“It absolutely came off on it’s own and I am a little uncomfortable the implication seems to be I’m not telling the truth,” she wrote back.
Earl was hoping for a refund — but wasn’t offered one — and hadn’t thought much about the upsetting experience until news of Sunday’s crash broke.
“I felt sick to my stomach — and that was before I knew it was the exact same plane I was in,” she said.
Ironically, the five passengers aboard the helicopter this time drowned because they couldn’t get their harnesses undone when the craft crashed and started to sink.
Earl says she can’t remember much hands-on training in how to free yourself from the straps — because everyone was more concerned with staying locked in.
“I remember being told where the emergency knife was on my harness but can’t remember being asked to get it out or practice finding it, and neither can [my boyfriend],” she said.
Liberty Helicopters and FlyNYON couldn’t be reached for comment.