‘It’s coming down!’ Witness says Miami Beach helicopter crash was ‘like something out of a movie’
February 19, 2022
Wade Callison was with his daughter, knee-deep in the ocean off Miami Beach, when he noticed a helicopter flying nearby on Saturday.
"I kind of thought, that's getting a little low, we should come back a little bit, so we took a few steps toward the shore, and all of a sudden it dove, and it started going toward this couple next to us, and we started yelling at them, 'Move! Move! Move! It's coming down! It's coming down!' And the helicopter just went straight into the water," Callison told CNN.
Callison said he and his daughter were about 20 feet away from the crash site.
"It was scary, because when it crashed the canopy broke and came toward us and landed right near us and in that moment, the instinct was we should get away," he said. "I don't know if this thing's going to blow up or not. And then it was like, there are people in there, I don't know how many people, so we just took off running toward it."
Callison said he and other rescuers were able to remove one woman from the helicopter and float her away on a surfboard. But another woman, who turned out to be her mother, was "very non-responsive" in the back.
"She was stuck in there for quite a while," he said. "We had about 15 people on the skid trying to stop it from sinking, it was trying to tip over and sink, so about 15 people were pulling it down to keep it upright so they could administer aid and we could get her out."
The pilot, meanwhile, we able to free himself from the wreckage on his own, although he suffered a large cut to the back of his head. The pilot and the rear passenger were listed in stable condition after being taken to a hospital, while the other woman was uninjured.
"It's like something out of a movie," Callison said. "It was really, really scary. ... The crash was just tremendous. You can see the waves from the video, and those waves hit us, because we were close enough to it. It splashed us, but it was just a huge, huge splash, and then everything goes quiet as you're trying to figure out what the situation is, if anyone's hurt. ... It was definitely everyone at their best trying to help these ladies."
Watch the interview below.
.