Federal safety officials say an air traffic controller should have warned the pilot of a small plane that collided with a helicopter over the Hudson River that there were other aircraft in his path.

The accident earlier this month near New York City killed nine people.

The National Transportation Safety Board said in a letter released Thursday that if the controller at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey had been following procedures he would have warned the pilot of the other traffic in his path.

The controller was talking on the phone to a female friend at the time of the crash, joking about barbecuing a dead cat.

In today’s letter, the NTSB called for several changes in the procedures for aircraft operating in the uncontrolled airspace below 1,100 feet in the Hudson River corridor, reports CBS News producer Carter Yang.

They include greater separation of helicopters and planes, with helicopters flying at a lower altitude and planes at a higher altitude; and new procedures for coordinating and communication between air traffic controllers at Teterboro and Newark and between controllers and pilots, with controllers providing constant advisories and alerts to pilots while they’re in the airspace.

While the NTSB letter today offers no new facts about the crash, it does renew its criticism of the Teterboro controller who was on his cell phone in the moments before the crash and his supervisor, who was out of the building at the time, Yang reports.

The Board says it is “concerned with the complacency and inattention to duty evidenced by” the two, noting again that, “the controller was not fully engaged in his duties.”

Officials for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which manages the airport, said that the phone call was to an employee of AvPORTS, a contractor at Teterboro.

During a phone call that ended 12 minutes before the Piper’s pilot told the tower that he was ready for takeoff, the transcripts show the controller was bantering with the woman about a dead cat that she apparently had to remove from airport property. Two minutes after the Piper took off, the controller called the woman back.

“We got plenty of gas in the grill?” the controller asked. “Fire up the cat.”

“Ooh, disgusting, augh, that thing was disgusting,” the woman responded.

They continued to banter about the cat while the controller directed traffic.

One second before the accident, the controller uttered a curse word and ended the call.

The Federal Aviation Administration said that it has placed the controller and his supervisor on administrative leave pending an investigation. The agency said the controller’s actions were inappropriate and unacceptable, but did not appear to have contributed to the accident.

That prompted a rebuke from the NTSB, which said it was up to the board to determine what role the controller’s actions may have played.

(Source: WCBSTV)