A tech company boss and his family are among six dead after a helicopter broke apart in midair and crashed upside-down into New York’s Hudson River.

The incident is the latest high-profile aviation disaster in the US, according to witnesses and a law enforcement official.

The New York Fire Department said it received a report of the crash between Manhattan and the New Jersey waterfront at 3.17pm on Thursday (local time).

All six, including three children, aboard were killed, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press.

Among them was Siemens executive Agustín Escobar, the tech company’s Spanish boss, and his family. The family had reportedly arrived in New York from Barcelona earlier on Thursday.

Photos posted to New York Helicopter Tours’ website before the crash included one of Escobar and his family posing in front of the helicopter.

The family before Thursday’s deadly flight. Photo: X

The pilot, who also died, is yet to be identified.

Witness Bruce Wall said he saw the helicopter “falling apart” in midair, with the tail and propeller coming off. The propeller was still spinning without the aircraft as it fell, he said.

Lesly Camacho, a hostess at a restaurant along the river in Hoboken, New Jersey, said she saw the helicopter – a Bell 206L-4 LongRanger IV – spinning uncontrollably before it slammed into the water.

“There was a bunch of smoke coming out. It was spinning pretty fast, and it landed in the water really hard,” she said.

Video posted to social media showed parts of the chopper splashing into the water. The overturned aircraft sank quickly, as rescue boats circled.

The skies were overcast at the time, but visibility over the river was not substantially impaired. Rescue crews had to deal with seven-degree water temperatures.

The US Federal Aviation Administration identified the helicopter model.

The Bell 206 is widely used in commercial and government aviation, including by sightseeing companies, TV news stations and police departments. It was initially developed for the US Army before being adapted for other uses. Thousands have been manufactured over the years.

The US National Transportation Safety Board said it would investigate.

The rescue craft were near the end of a long maintenance pier for a ventilation tower serving the Holland Tunnel on the New Jersey side of the river. Fire trucks and other emergency vehicles were on nearby streets with their lights flashing.

The skies over Manhattan are routinely filled with planes and helicopters, both private recreational aircraft and commercial and tourist flights. Manhattan has several helipads that whisk business executives and others to destinations across the metropolitan area.

Over the years, there have been multiple crashes, including a collision between a plane and a tourist helicopter over the Hudson River in 2009 that killed nine people and the 2018 crash of a charter helicopter offering “open door” flights that went down into the East River, killing five people.

A medical transport plane killed seven people when it plummeted into a Philadelphia neighbourhood in January. That happened two days after an American Airlines jet and an Army helicopter collided in midair in Washington — the deadliest US air disaster in a generation.

The crashes and other close calls have left some people worried about the safety of flying.

-with AAP