A SINGLE missing or faulty bolt – known in aviation as the “Jesus nut” – may have triggered the catastrophic Hudson River chopper crash, an expert has warned.
Aviation analyst Julian Bray suggested the critical component, which holds the rotor system in place, may have failed mid-flight and led to the .
A lacking or faulty “Jesus nut”, he said, could have caused the chopper blades to detach while still spinning and slice through the aircraft .
Just moments before the crash, chilling footage captured the exact moment the Bell 206 helicopter snapped in half and spiralled into the river near New Jersey.
The rotor blades can be seen flying off as the fuselage drops into the Hudson.
Bray told Flying Eze: “What appears to have happened with this particular helicopter is that the rotor, the main rotor... had detached, because in one video we see the blades spinning away from the helicopter.
“But this appears to have sliced through the back half of the helicopter, so the fuselage then drops like a stone into the river Hudson right opposite Pier 41.”;
Bray said that the likely culprit is the so-called “Jesus nut” – a single bolt that holds the entire rotor system together.
“There is a particular procedure which has to be checked every time it’s serviced, and it’s known as the Jesus Bolt... because without that the whole thing will fall apart,”; he said.
“It looks as though it’s [the] Jesus bolt or Jesus PIN.
“It’s either defective or wasn’t tightened up, or for some reason it sheared.”;
The doomed chopper was , including two Siemens executive parents and their three children, as well as the pilot.
All six were tragically killed when the aircraft plunged into the water.
“It came down and landed on the Hudson, but upside down, and it’s quite shallow there,”; Bray explained.
“So the skids which normally be underneath the fuselage are actually poking up above the water.”;
The Bell 206L-4 LongRanger IV departed from a downtown Manhattan helipad around 3pm Thursday.
It followed a popular sightseeing route along the Hudson, which includes flying past the iconic Statue of Liberty.
But the chopper turned south near the George Washington Bridge and crashed just minutes later.
Emergency teams rushed to the scene, launching divers from a nearby operations base — but the mission quickly turned from rescue to recovery after all onboard died in the crash.
Bray said the helicopter was “a fairly new one”; and part of a widely used fleet.
“It’s a very popular helicopter. All the television companies use them for their news helicopters, and the police use them as well.”;
But he warned: “We particularly need to know why this one happened, because there’s nobody else involved, as far as we can see.”;
The aviation expert went on to urge investigators to examine the aircraft's maintenance logs and speak to the Director of Maintenance immediately.
“Check that it has been properly maintained... also have a look at the weather conditions, because I understood that when they took off it was clear... but suddenly the fog, the mist, the haze came over and at one point there was some snow,”; Bray said.
He added: “The engine was definitely running... In the videos, we’ve seen the rotor still spinning away from the helicopter. So it could be a maintenance issue. It could be a design fault.
“It’s very sad. Lots of people do this. It doesn’t happen that often... But this time, something critical went wrong.”;
It comes as the tour firm behind the horror crash has a chilling history of sky-high close calls.
New York Helicopter Charter has been involved in multiple terrifying incidents in the past 12 years –
Meanwhile, the family killed in the sightseeing trip reportedly booked the doomed helicopter
