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On Thursday at 3 p.m. ET, a helicopter flew along the Manhattan skyline for less than 18 minutes before plunging into the Hudson River. The sightseeing helicopter carried a family of five from Spain. Law enforcement confirmed the identity of the passengers to ABC News as Agustin Escobar, an executive from European automation company Siemens, along with his wife, Merce Camprubi Montal, and their three children. The family, along with the pilot, all died in the crash. The helicopter was chartered by the company New York Helicopter, which posted photos of the smiling family inside the aircraft just before it took off. The chopper appeared to be a N216MHa Bell 206L-4, according to a Flight Radar statement posted to X (formerly Twitter). The owner of the company and CEO, Michael Roth, said the pilot of the aircraft had radioed about needing fuel just before the aircraft began flying erratically. He [the pilot] called in that he was landing and that he needed fuel, and it should have taken him about three minutes to arrive, but 20 minutes later, he didnt arrive, Roth told The Telegraph. Safety concerns in the wake of the tragedy The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the incident, but the tragedy may concern potential future flyers. In the wake of the incident, the helicopter company’s track record is also being scoured, and it seems that a murky financial history, and previous close-calls. According to court records, per The Wall Street Journal, New York Helicopter seemed to be facing financial challenges. Just this February, Wynwood Capital Group, a cash-advance firm, sued the company. It alleged that it had advanced $50,000 to the company in January in exchange for nearly $75,000 in future receivables. But days later, the company was blocked from recouping the money. The outlet also reported that in December, one of the company’s aircrafts was repossessed by PHI Aviation, the company it was leased from for failure to make payments. In 2019, the New York Helicopter filed for bankruptcy. The New York Times also reported that in 2013, in an incident that now appears eerily similar to Thursday’s crash, one of the company’s aircrafts lost power. No one was injured in the incident, but the helicopter was forced to make an emergency “hard landing.” Another emergency situation occurred just two years later, in 2015. An investigation into the incident found that a faulty drive shaft had been painted, so it wasn’t possible to deduce whether it had been involved in a previous hard landing. Investigators called it deliberate concealment and reuse of the faulty component by unknown personnel. While adventurers may not want to swear off taking a helicopter ride just yet, it’s important to note that helicopter tours do come with some risk, and it’s important to research the tour company before booking.Still, according to data from the United States Helicopter Safety Team, crashes are not all that uncommon. Nationwide, there were 89 accidents in 2024, resulting in 30 fatalities. The previous year, there were even more accidents101, but only 29 fatalities as a result.Fast Company reached out to New York Helicopter but did not hear back by the time of publication.
Category:
E-Commerce
While President Trump likes to putt, traders are leaning into the Trump put. The “Trump put” was an idea that traders would lean on during his first term, and in essence, is rooted in the concept that Trump uses the stock market as something of a scoreboard. And now, some are saying that the “Trump put” is back, at least if you count the presidents latest actions in relation to the markets this past week. As the markets wobbled, and then cratered in response to the announcement of his tariff schedule, Trumpperhaps predictably, per the Trump put ideacanceled or paused most of what had previously been announced. In other words, the Trump put is the belief that when the markets start to fall, Trump will take action to turn them around. Thats exactly what he did this past weekmore or less confirming that theres something to the notion. Note, though, that there have been other variations of the Trump put over the years, too. For instance, theres been the Greenspan put, and even the Powell put. Again, the idea is that if the market falls too far, someone will step in and bail it out. More specifically this past week, however, Trump was likely swayed to reverse course on his wide-ranging tariff schedule due to action in the bond market. Bonds are typically considered something of a safe haven for investors, and the bond market itself is far less volatile than the equities market. But following Trumps announcements on tariffs, bond interest rates rapidly increased, which was a sign that investors were less confident in the strength of the economy going forward, and therefore, made it more expensive for the government and businesses to borrow money because theres more inherent risk. That was evidently enough to spook Trump who, despite his rhetoric, paused tariffs on most countries, although he dug in deeper against China. The question for traders and investors, going forward, is whether Trump will remain as susceptible to the whims of the market as he was during his first term. So far, hes shown more restraint, but as we learned this week, he has his limits.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Donald Trump’s administration has been predicting its barrage of tariffs targeting China will push Apple into manufacturing the iPhone in the United States for the first time.But that’s an unlikely scenario even with U.S tariffs now standing at 145% on products made in China the country where Apple has manufactured most of its iPhones since the first model hit the market 18 years ago.The disincentives for Apple shifting its production domestically include a complex supply chain that it began building in China during the 1990s. It would take several years and cost billions of dollars to build new plants in the U.S., and then confront Apple with economic forces that could triple the price of an iPhone, threatening to torpedo sales of its marquee product.“The concept of making iPhones in the U.S. is a non-starter,” asserted Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, reflecting a widely held view in the investment community that tracks Apple’s every move. He estimated that the current $1,000 price tag for an iPhone made in China, or India, would soar to more than $3,000 if production shifted to the U.S. And he believes that moving production domestically likely couldn’t be done until, at the earliest, 2028. “Price points would move so dramatically, it’s hard to comprehend.”Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment Wednesday. The Cupertino, California, company has yet to publicly discuss its response to Trump’s tariffs on China, but the topic may come up on May 1 when Apple CEO Tim Cook is scheduled to field questions from analysts during a quarterly conference call to discuss the company’s financial results and strategy.And there is no doubt the China tariffs will be a hot-button issue given Apple’s stock price has dropped by 15% and lowered the company’s market value by $500 billion since Trump began increasing them on April 2.If the tariffs hold, Apple is widely expected to eventually raise the prices on iPhones and other popular products because the Silicon Valley’s supply chain is so heavily concentrated in China, India and other overseas markets caught in the crossfire of the escalating trade war.The big question is how long Apple might be willing to hold the line on its current prices before the tariffs’ toll on the company’s profit margins become too much to bear and consumers are asked to shoulder some of the burden.One of the main reasons that Apple has wiggle room to hold the line on its current iPhone pricing while the China tariffs remain in place is because the company continues to reap huge profit margins from the revenue generated by the subscriptions and other services tied to its product, said Forrester Research analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee. That division, which collected $96 billion in revenue during Apple’s last fiscal year, remains untouched by Trump’s tariffs.“Apple can absorb some of the tariff-induced cost increases without significant financial impact, at least in the short term,” Chatterjee said.Apple tried to appease Trump in February by announcing plans to spend $500 billion and hire 20,000 people in the U.S. through 2028, but none of it was tied to making an iPhone domestically. Instead, Apple pledged to fund a Houston data center for computer servers powering artificial intelligence a technology the company is expanding into as part of an industrywide craze.When asked this week about whether Trump believes Apple intends to build iPhones in the U.S., White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt pointed to Apple’s investment promise as evidence that the company thinks it could be done. “If Apple didn’t think the United States could do it, they probably wouldn’t have put up that big chunk of change,” Leavitt said.U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also predicted tariffs would force a manufacturing shift during an April 6 appearance on a CBS news program. “The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America,” Lutnick said.But during a 2017 appearance at a conference in China, Cook expressed doubt about whether the U.S. labor pool had enough workers with the vocational skills required to do the painstaking and tedious work that Lutnick was discussing.“In the U.S. you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room,” Cook said. “In China, you could fill multiple football fields.”Trump also tried to pressure Apple, to no avail, into shifting iPhone production to the U.S. during his first term as president. But the administration ultimately exempted the iPhone from the tariffs he imposed on China back then a period when Apple had announced a commitment to invest $350 billion in the U.S. Trump’s first-term tariffs on China also prompted Apple to begin a process that led to some of its current iPhones being made in India and some of its other products being manufactured in Vietnam.Cook also took the president on a 2019 tour of a Texas plant where Apple had been assembling some of its Mac computers since 2013. Shortly after finishing that our, Trump took credit for the plant that Apple had opened while Barack Obama was president. “Today I opened a major Apple Manufacturing plant in Texas that will bring high paying jobs back to America,” Trump posted on Nov. 19, 2019. Michael Liedtke, AP Technology Writer
Category:
E-Commerce
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