Tuesday, June 11, 2019

Helicopter/Heliopolis: AXA, Pan Am, and Snuff

NBC News and other media called what happened, "PTSD from 9/11."

AXA Equitable Center Building




A helicopter crashed into the roof of the AXA Equitable Center building in New York City at 1:43 p.m. on Monday, June 10, 2019. Only a few blocks from Trump Tower, the area is in the post-2016 no-fly-zone.





The hard crash on the roof killed the pilot of the helicopter and caused a fire. Tim McCormack was identified as the pilot. McCormack served as a volunteer fire firefighter with the East Clinton Volunteer Fire Department in Clinton Corners, New York, for more than 25 years, serving as its chief for 10 years. He had two stepdaughters and three grandchildren.



McCormack told workers at the East River helipad he thought he had a clearing in the skies where he could make the flight, according to law enforcement sources. Once he was in the air, he got on the radio saying he might need to return, the sources said.

The helicopter was airborne for about 11 minutes before crashing. The aircraft could be seen flying erratically in the sky, making dramatic dips and turns before vanishing into the clouds. Investigators say there is no indication of terrorism.

The AXA Equitable Center is at 787 Seventh Ave. in Manhattan, between 51st and 52nd streets.

The company now known as AXA Equitable built the 51-story building at 787 Seventh Ave. in 1985.

At that time, AXA Equitable was an arm of AXA S.A. of Paris, and it went by the name AXA Financial. The building on Seventh Avenue was originally known as the Equitable Tower. The tower was known for being the home of the Equitable Center art complex.

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) bought the building from AXA for $1.9 billion in 2016.

AXA Equitable now has its headquarters offices a few blocks away from the AXA Equitable Center, at 1290 Avenue of the Americas. Two company employees work in an AXA Equitable video studio in the AXA Equitable Center, and those employees are fine, according to an AXA Equitable spokesman.

A number of people who work in the building have reported on Twitter that they felt the building shake when the helicopter hit it.

The aircraft had taken off from the helipad at West 34th Street on the Hudson River and planned to go in the direction of the Statue of Liberty, which is several miles south of there. The AXA building does not have a helipad.

[As a single-person crash ~ whether of an airplane, helicopter, car, or truck ~ suicidology dictates that there is a good statistical basis for investigating whether the cause of the wreck was suicide.]
 

Pan Am Building


The image of the rare souvenir replica of the Pan Am Building is courtesy of InFocusTech (who has re-issued this piece, recently).

During a street news conference at the scene of the incident, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said that since the "Pan Am helicopter crash" of a few years ago, helipads had been shut down in mid-town Manhattan. Public helipads in Manhattan, of which there are now three, have been confined to the coasts of the island since the Pan Am crash.

On May 16, 1977, about one minute after a Sikorsky S-61L landed on the Pan Am helipad, and its 20 passengers disembarked, the right front landing gear collapsed, causing the aircraft to topple onto its side with the rotors still turning. One of the five 20-foot (6.1 m) blades broke off and flew into a crowd of passengers waiting to board. Three men were killed instantly and another died later in a hospital. The blade sailed over the side of the building and killed a female pedestrian on the corner of Madison Avenue and 43rd Street. Two other people were seriously injured. Helicopter service was quickly suspended, and never resumed.

The victims of the Pan Am incident were filmmaker Michael Findlay, NYU student Clay S. Young, lawyer David J. Toomey, Italian tourist Enrico Gnaga, and Bronx native Anne Barnecott.



Findlay, and his wife Roberta, have been called ""the most notorious filmmakers in the annals of sexploitation."


Findlay, 39, had gone to South America in 1973 and made a film called Night of the Blood Eaters. A producer added some footage to his film, and released it with the title Snuff. The fiction film was picketed by feminists and widely criticized because of the violence it portrayed: it ended with the killing of a woman. Findley made several B films, such as Body of a Female that included “blood and guts, sex and violence.”






Michael Findlay is credited as the director of the classic cryptozoological cinema movie, Shriek of the Mutilated (1974). He also played (uncredited) the "Decapitation Onlooker" in this film.



The irony is that the media in 1977 reported "that grindhouse filmmaker Michael Findlay was infamously decapitated" by a rogue helicopter blade in an accident as horrific as his trademark gory on-screen murders. The New York Daily News reported that pieces of bodies were scattered over the Grand Central area; an eyewitness described the scene as "like a butcher shop."

[Five years later, Vic Morrow was decapitated by a helicopter. In 1982, Morrow was cast in a feature role in Twilight Zone: The Movie, in a segment directed by John Landis. (Landis' first directing role was for Schlock, a Bigfoot movie, in 1973.)...In the early morning hours of July 23, 1982, Morrow and two child actors, seven-year-old Myca Dinh Le, and six-year-old Renee Shin-Yi Chen, were filming on location in California, in an area that was known as Indian Dunes, near Santa Clarita. They were performing in a scene for the Vietnam sequence, in which their characters attempt to escape out of a deserted Vietnamese village from a pursuing U.S. Army helicopter. The helicopter was hovering at approximately 24 feet above them when the heat from special effect pyrotechnic explosions reportedly delaminated the rotor blades and caused the helicopter to crash on top of them, killing all three instantly. Morrow and Le were decapitated and mutilated by the helicopter rotor blades, while Chen was crushed by a helicopter strut. Morrow's daughter is Jennifer Jason Leigh.]


The Pan Am Building today is the MetLife Building.


Other NYC Crashes

New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle and his flight instructor were killed on October 11, 2006, when Lidle’s small plane crashed into a 42-story building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Eighteen people were injured in the crash. (As I wrote in 2006 about this incident: "Don't ignore the fact that this was on 10/11, and many people had a post-traumatic 9/11 reaction.")

Five people died after a helicopter crashed in New York City's East River on Sunday, March 11, 2018.

It was on March 11, 2018, when five people aboard a New Jersey-based sightseeing helicopter were killed after their aircraft crashed into the East River off the coast of Manhattan.

Heliopolis ~ Helicopter

Bennu bird


Writer Goro Adachi observes: "The helicopter that crashed in Manhattan yesterday (a model called AgustaWestland AW109/A109) was made by an Italian company called Leonardo S.p.A. officially named after Leonardo da Vinci! And the crash happened on the exact day highlighted beforehand based on a long-running 'phoenix' pattern heavily involving Leonardo." (See more here.)

What I want to point out is this note: 
"Helicopter" implies "phoenix". Something [Goro Adachi] actually noted just last month:
May 15 "City of the Sun"
Heliopolis” is the ancient Egyptian “City of the Sun” and the word “helicopter” implies “Egyptian Sun” (since heli = “sun” and copt = “ancient Egyptian”). […] Heliopolis is the “home” of the Benben Stone and the ancient Egyptian phoenix, the Bennu bird. Which is why I mentioned it in the first place.

From Wikipedia:
New Kingdom artwork shows the Bennu as a grey heron with a long beak and a two-feathered crest, sometimes perched on a benben stone (representing Ra) or in a willow tree (representing Osiris). Because of its connection with Osiris, it sometimes wears the atef crown. 
A large species of heron, now extinct, lived on the Arabian Peninsula in comparatively recent times. It may have been the ultimate inspiration for the Bennu. Reflecting this, the species was described as the Bennu heron (Ardea bennuides).
The Greek historian Herodotus, writing about Egypt in the fifth century BC, wrote that the people at Heliopolis described the phoenix to him. They said it lived for 500 years before dying, resuscitating, building a funerary egg with myrrh for the paternal corpse, and carrying it to the temple of the Sun at Heliopolis. His description of the phoenix likens it to an eagle with red and gold plumage, reminiscent of the sun. The theme of the fire, pyre and ashes of the dying bird developed long after Herodotus. The name of the phoenix could be derived from "Bennu", and its rebirth and connections with the sun resemble those of the Bennu bird, although Egyptian sources do not mention the bird's death.


Anubis holding the mummy of the scribe Ani, with Bennu assisting.


Heliopolis Senusert I Obelisk

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