many dozens, if not more people injured and killed. do we know why the pilot decided to take off when he did? because the cloud ceiling was very low today. that building that he ended up landing in, i mean it was in the clouds. you couldn t even see the top of it from the ground. reporter: yeah, this was a miserable day in new york. apparently, he was at the 34th street helicopter pad on the east side of the city, waiting and waiting to take off. and he, apparently, decided that it was the time to go, and he was able to take off and move out and they were able to sort of track him. anderson? and what about the helicopter s flight path? because the mayor was saying it s very unusual for the helicopter to have been over manhattan in that way in that area. it s near trump tower, near times square. you don t see that. reporter: it would be interesting to figure out exactly where that video that you showed at the top is, because so, it took off from the east side of manhattan on 3
building managers think about. certainly manhattan, which has been a target for many, many years and certainly after 9/11, where a lot of these building have been training for that. they run drills on what to do. and luckily, you know, right now it seems as sad as this is for certainly what happened here, we have one pilot who is dead, and now really just a lot of answers as to what s going on. i think it s interesting that this helicopter was in the air given the weather. i think that s going to be a big question on everyone s mind is why was this helicopter flying given the weather? yeah. to miles point, miles is one of our favorite pilots we talk to on cnn, miles oh brian. we were oh brian. we were talking about the make and the model of the helicopter. maybe he needed to crash land. once we learned what type it was, it s a twin engine. if you lose one, you have the other. his question, of course, might it have been bad, bad weather. brooke, as you know, these
port authority which manages the airports in new york. they ve been scouring some of the air traffic control audio to see if there was a distress call. we don t know if that occurred. if the pilot of this helicopter in any way called into air traffic control. it could be jfd or la guardia airport. sometimes the helicopters are on a separate frequently over new york and have ways of communicating with each other. though on a day like today, i suspect there weren t any other helicopters flying around there. it s notable too, i want to point out, one of the issues why we re not getting better pictures from the scene is none of the news held cicopters are flying. every station owns a helicopter. the weather is not permitting the helicopters to get off the ground. if those helicopters are not permitted to fly in this weather, why was this helicopter up in the air? obviously that s going to be a
it s not clear how many. and it sounds like it was only on the helicopter at this point. the fire broke out on the building when this helicopter either made a controlled crash landing or called an emergency and hit the roof and a fire broke out. it seems like the fire department was able to get it out quite quickly. you keep mentioning you re looking at perhaps a different video of the top of this building. i don t see what appears to be smoke. it looks like either gray rain or clouds up at the top of that building. it may be a little grayer coming off the top of that building, but that may be the natural rain coming off the top of that building. it s hard to see if there s anything left of this crash right now. do you know quickly, was there a helicopter a helicopter pad on top of the building? i just keep wondering was this pilot thinking i got to get this
to come down to get air speed because you have to get air speed as quickly as you can if you have trouble to pick your landing spot. what you have to do is get air speed, get the energy and inertia into the blades so you can lift back up again and pick where you re going to land. so that may have been what he was trying to do. it s called an out of rotation and trying to get the speed up to pick his landing spot. but obviously it didn t work out the way he had planned. when i ve been talking to miles, and this was before we got the make and model of the helicopter, he had been saying perhaps he lost an engine, he or she lost an engine and was forced to crash land on the building. but we just discovered from the statement it s an augusta a 109-e helicopter. it s a twin engine. if you lose an engine, you have another one. what more can you ascertain from