'Never seen anything like this': Aviation safety expert shocked by unique nature of crash

David Soucie, a former Federal Aviation Administration safety inspector, told CNN's Kate Bolduan on Friday that he was shocked seeing footage from earlier this week of a helicopter that crashed into the Hudson River in New York City this week.

In an interview, Bolduan noted that the helicopter seemed to fall out of the sky "like a rock" and asked Soucie what his "key questions" about the crash were.

"Looking at this video, after 45 years of being in this industry -- I was a helicopter mechanic, I was trained as a mechanic on this particular model of helicopter -- and I just can't imagine I've never seen anything like this at all," he began. "The first place to start is you can see that the main rotor is separated from the from the helicopter, and it turned upside down. The tail boom is also missing. So one of the things I'd be looking at is some type of failure in the rotor blade system or... most likely at this point is the reduced RPMs. In other words, if the engine goes fails on a helicopter, you go into an autorotation and you put the collective down and it speeds up the blades so that you can land safely. In this case, a possibility would be that the rotor speed got so low that the blades started to droop down, and a quick movement can cause that blade to hit the tail... and that appears to me to be the most likely scenario."

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He nonetheless said it was too early to tell for certain what had caused the crash.

Later in the interview, Bolduan noted that there have been multiple aviation crashes reported this year and she asked Soucie if he believed that there was some kind of "break" in the aviation safety system that needed to be addressed.

"I'd like to tell everyone that there isn't one single thing that's causing all these events," he said. "There isn't one single point of failure that I can see or understand. But what's important to understand is we all talk about statistics and how safe air travel is, and it is."

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