Helicopter

[Astro14]

Originally Posted by fdcg27

Originally Posted by Astro14

The decision to fly was the thing that killed them. The weather was below VFR. Helicopters "scud run" all the time. Very easy to get IFR when you're scud running...and then you run into things like mountains or buildings. Pressure to fly from a rich owner, overconfidence in one's ability to fly, insufficient training, poor risk assessment. All of it led to one bad decision: leaving the ground.

Not so much the decision to fly but the decision to try to stay VFR. The pilot was qualified for IFR and the machine would certainly have been equipped for it. Why didn't the pilot file IFR in air before he lost visual contact.? Also, this craft didn't hit anything while flying. It appears to have spiraled into the ground. Why? Pilot got the leans? He seems to have had too much flight experience for that and should have known to look at the panel and follow it, not the seat of his pants. There's a lot more to this than a pilot deciding to fly in very marginal visual conditions.

You're making it complicated when it's actually simple: Flew into IFR conditions. Got disoriented. Crashed. That's about it. Fog is insidious. IFR rating and IFR ability aren't the same. Knowing and admitting you're in over your head aren't easy. The LAPD helicopter pilots were grounded that morning by SOP. They've got extensive flight time. But they were bound by the wisdom of their SOP and stayed on the ground.

 

[Exhaustgases]

Date of this is 2009, Enhanced vision by flir. I had no problem at night and under the hood in the old days of flying with being disoriented, and I have no where the time the chopper pilot had.There is no excuse a multi million dollar helicopter did not have the best of the best enhanced vision and synthetic vision systems. There is no excuse to crash in the fog. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r3PeTARwfw This guy did one better than flying in fog. https://pioneersofflight.si.edu/content/doolittle-and-first-blind-flight With these fancy systems and with the good old analogs as a back up. I would feel totally comfortable taking off in dense fog. But never do I again care to fly in a helicopter, only fixed wing.

 

[Astro14]

You're conflating synthetic vision by FLIR (which costs several million just for the install) with the Garmin "synthetic vision" that you linked - which is just a fancy display with terrain features overlaid behind the attitude/flight display. The Garmin still requires actual instrument ability. Doolittle displayed the first instrument ability. It's not easy to get an instrument rating. It's not easy to fly in hard IFR and it's not easy to recognize when you're in over your head. And, honestly, time in a simulator has little to do with actual flight into decreasing visibility.

 

[Snagglefoot]

John F Kennedy Jr. crashed his plane in 1999 and as killed along with his wife and sister in law. The cause as described in Wiki was due to Spacial Disorientation. Unfortunately he did not have his instrument rating but never the less choppers are tougher than planes to control in bad visibility situations. IMHO

 

[Astro14]

Spatial disorientation accidents happen with depressing regularity....it's all too common for pilots to fly into conditions that exceed their abilities. JFK jr. was the last high profile/celebrity one, but they happen all the time. Nobody would've cared about this crash, it would've been second-page news for a day, except that Kobe was on board. All the calls for action, and all the hand-wringing, are specious. It's another crash from spatial disorientation, from a pilot that lacked the good judgement to cancel that flight. And every time it happens, the path to the crash is the same: fail to understand the conditions, pressure to fly, encounter adverse conditions, crash. The visibility on the ground is irrelevant, by the way, it's the in-flight visibility that matters, and the difference between the ground, and even 50 feet up can be dramatic.

 

[quint]

As long as we're all second guessing (well, some of us)... what exactly would have been the appropriate thing to do in this case? In a C-172, I can see a huge issue because you have to keep moving. In the case of a chopper, couldn't you (theoretically, at least) simply stop forward motion, and go vertical and attempt to get out of the fog and orientate yourself? Like I have any idea what I'm talking about....

 

[Exhaustgases]

Originally Posted by Astro14

You're conflating synthetic vision by FLIR (which costs several million just for the install) with the Garmin "synthetic vision" that you linked - which is just a fancy display with terrain features overlaid behind the attitude/flight display. The Garmin still requires actual instrument ability. Doolittle displayed the first instrument ability. It's not easy to get an instrument rating. It's not easy to fly in hard IFR and it's not easy to recognize when you're in over your head. And, honestly, time in a simulator has little to do with actual flight into decreasing visibility.

The last link I posted had both flir and synthetic vision. Do the search you can get flir EVS for around $20K. And soon high grade systems will overlay flir, syn vision and millimeter radar to give high grade synthetic vision. The hardest part of IFR is communicating with ATC. There were not small plane simulators when I was flying. I did both day and night flying on instruments with an instructor, and actually ended up in a zero visibility condition once alone, I'm here to tell about it. If the chopper had both synthetic vision and the flir EVS, there would be zero disorientation. There is no excuse these modern days for any pilot to be disorientated while flying as long as all the gizmo's are working right. I and my brother had zero problem with less than 20 hours flight time at that time, being put in an unusual attitude and flying out of it under instruments. And in those days it was all old school stuff, all analog no fancy screens. Also at night solo and if not sure where the strange airport was I would use VOR to find it, and being 10 miles out and hills that are as high as 1000 agl makes it difficult if your flying around 2500 or less agl. Kobe's chopper didn't come down from the fog or the pilot, unless the pilot had a heart attack. Remember ATC never got a reply back as he was climbing, easy stuff to key a chopper mic, its a button on the cyclic control stick.

 

[Mr Nice]

Not to change the subject.... If you get a chance read the book Chickenhawk by Robert Mason. Excellent book. 👍 He flew the Huey in Vietnam and talks a lot about flying IFR in very poor weather conditions. He is out with a group of 6 Hueys returning from a mission and the CO wants all to maintain formation and decend through the clouds back to base. Every pilot knows this is a poor decision yet CO wants the other pilots to follow his lead into an area surrounded by hills and zero visibility. After some argument the CO gives in to objections by the other pilots and all fly out to the ocean and then fly under the clouds snaking their way back to base. Pilots are upset the CO almost got them killed and chew him out when back on the ground. One bad decision could of had all 6 Hueys crashing into the side of a hill because bad decision making and complacency. Sometimes people let their guard down without realizing the dangers.

 

[edyvw]

Originally Posted by Astro14

Originally Posted by Exhaustgases

Fog is no excuse for a crash nowadays. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGEagkcsXg Agree with the above post, more to the story.

Fancy displays don't bestow an instrument rating, or situational awareness, or good judgment.

^This.

 

[mk378]

Yes going straight up would be the best way out of that situation, but before you can get lift you need to level out the helicopter and have the rotor at the top. When you can't see which way is up that is what instruments are for. Disorientation though can cause a pilot to think he's flying straight and level when the truth is anything but. The instruments don't need to be fancy but you do have to look at them.

 

[Dodgetracker]

Not really. Best would have been not to go in first place. Second best would have been to declare inadvertent IMC and requested vectoring back to base. Who knows the cause? Maybe pilot suffered a Medical emergency or something happened in the back that caused him to try and turn around to see, natural tendency is to push forward on the stick as leverage.

 

[Astro14]

Originally Posted by quint

As long as we're all second guessing (well, some of us)... what exactly would have been the appropriate thing to do in this case? In a C-172, I can see a huge issue because you have to keep moving. In the case of a chopper, couldn't you (theoretically, at least) simply stop forward motion, and go vertical and attempt to get out of the fog and orientate yourself? Like I have any idea what I'm talking about....

Having flown a few helicopters - let me tell you that hovering is hard. Really hard. To fly an airplane, you've got to keep three dimensions in control: pitch, roll, and yaw. Yaw is usually pretty easy in jets, a bit of trim in a prop, so, for basic control in IFR: pitch and roll, and then you have o navigate: heading and altitude control. To hover, however, you've got to keep six dimensions in control: pitch, roll, yaw, left/right drift, fore-aft drift and power (collective). Power changes yaw dramatically, so you're really managing a far harder control problem in hover than in regular flight. At about 20-25 knots, when the helo goes into translational lift, it starts to fly like a conventional airplane, up to modest speed (100+ knots) and then there are other helo-unique issues, like loss of retreating-blade lift, power limitations, etc. So, to hover requires control of those six parameters, while maintaining conventional control of a helo moving forward requires control of the usual three. Hard to hover in VFR. Insanely difficult to hover in true IFR. Your best bet when encountering IFR in a helicopter is to keep your airspeed modest (above translational lift speed but well below maximum) and fly it like a regular airplane. But in IFR, with all airplanes, you have to navigate while you maintain control. Scud-running, as mentioned earlier, puts you in a pickle: you're trying to maintain visual ground contact and navigate while flying, you can get into fog/low cloud where that ground contact is gone instantly - and the transition to instrument flying may not happen smoothly as somatogravic illusions take place. You get "the leans" bad, and you desperately want to see the ground again, so, perhaps your instrument scan isn't as disciplined as it needs to be while you look below to try and regain ground contact, which causes more illusions, more inner-ear accelerations, and you become disoriented in a hurry. This helicopter hit the ground at high airspeed and a high rate of descent. That's got spatial disorientation written all over it. Helos don't usually fly at high airspeed and high rates of descent are not a good idea (ring vortex). No way the pilot was intentionally putting it into that set of parameters.

 

[Snagglefoot]

Go ahead and check the time to drive from Irvine to Thousand Oaks. At the time I checked, Google said 2-1/2 hours. No way could they have decided to drive instead of fly and still make the game. Think Kobe Bryant was going to miss the game? Wish I was wrong.

 

[Wolf359]

There was only one pilot and it sounds like there could have been two pilots. Would a second pilot have helped?

 

[Exhaustgases]

2 pilots would have likely overloaded it, and or they would have to leave someone behind. If you listen to that pilots students they nothing but very good things to say about him. He was top notch. He was instrument rated, he knew how to fly in IMC very well, he knew how to use the instruments, unless they failed. Airspeed in any aircraft is the most important instrument, no way was he going to dive to the ground on purpose. I've also flown helicopter, I hate the things, and yes super difficult for a low hour pilot to hover, especially 15 to 20 feet off the ground. Helicopters are dangerous very high maintenance aircraft. Most of the crashes they have been in that is caused by failure of the machine, is broken tail rotor system. There is no redundancy for that, and if anything would cause it to go out of control that would do it. As well as losing a main rotor blade. Lack of keying the mic, heart attack. Then you can laugh, crashing into a flying saucer.

 

[Astro14]

High flight time doesn't always confer experience or competence.* Further, most helicopter pilots aren't practiced/experienced in IFR. So, I take the 8,000 logged flight hours of the pilot on this flight with a huge grain of salt - it means he's been flying for a while - but doesn't mean that he's good, or capable. And, as stated, he was under pressure to fly in marginal conditions. Many pilots make lousy decisions (to fly in weather that they can't handle, for example, or exceed a limit, or break a rule) with zero consequences. They then get used to that poor decision as normal, never realizing that their risk is high every time they do it. It's known as the "normalization of deviance" and the classic example is the Space Shuttle o-rings. Flight after flight, the o-rings burned through - a huge problem, but since the shuttle didn't blow up, they didn't fix the o-rings and kept flying. Then, the Challenger blew up. And all along, the lowly engineers who said flying with this problem was wrong, were ignored by those in authority who were pressured to make poor decisions. So, scud run a few times without crashing, and eventually, scud running becomes "normal" - even though it's a terrible idea and reflects poor judgment. But it's become "normal" so you do it, just like flying with o-rings that burn through. And it's all good - right up until disaster strikes. It's a case of "doing wrong feels so right" because it worked out a few times, and you got away with it, so it must be OK, it must be normal, it must be safe and you feel like you're good at making decisions because everything worked out OK. *ref: Socrates and his position on the unexamined life - many pilots never take the time to evaluate their performance, never improve, never have the desire to improve. I've seen very high-time pilots (30,000+ hours) who have simply become so complacent that they have no idea how inept they've become. Their simulator performance warranted additional training and evaluation. Some of those evaluations resulted in additional training and revelation to the pilot, while some of those resulted in permanent retirement from flying.

 

[Sayjac]

Slightly off topic, but not entirely and not more so than some others posted here. I wondered Monday why the initial crash thread on Gen topics subforum to which I was an early contributor Sunday afternoon was disappeared/deleted. After reading several posts and comments here more or less confirmed my suspicions. Without going into detail, while unfortunate, all things considered unsurprising.

 

[PimTac]

I've mentioned before in similar threads but all of us have a internal alarm that starts telling our brain that something is not quite right. I don't fly but I've been in a couple of dangerous situations where I remembered that nagging feeling. We will never know but I wonder if that alarm was going off for the pilot?

 

[Sam_Julier]

To Astro's point about the "unexamined life". My former flight instructor (over 10,000 hours) took his student in her brand new turbo-charged single engine Piper on a training flight from HVN to Cortland NY. The mid January trip was to deliver his daughter and her roommate back for the Spring semester at SUNY Cortland and give his student some instrument instruction. The Cortland weather was at minimums. After missing the approach they diverted to Ithaca. The plane crashed just short of the runway at Ithaca killing all onboard. The wings and engine nacelle were caked with ice. I was a really cautious pilot. I studied everything I could get my hands on. Including Aerodynamics for Naval Aviators. My plane was a C182 with STOL wingtips. A safe, easy to fly plane by any measure. But I quickly decided that my instrument and commercial rating, 542 hours wasn't enough. I sold the plane that week and have never regretted the decision.

 

[Astro14]

Originally Posted by Sayjac

Slightly off topic, but not entirely and not more so than some others posted here. I wondered Monday why the initial crash thread on Gen topics subforum to which I was an early contributor Sunday afternoon was disappeared/deleted. After reading several posts and comments here more or less confirmed my suspicions. Without going into detail, while unfortunate, all things considered unsurprising.

I'm sorry that thread (RIP Kobe Bryant) was deleted. Some comments were worthwhile. Some were political, or unkind, attacking people and institutions. Ultimately, it was too hard to save the worthwhile parts. I think we all agree that crashes are a tragedy. This one makes me both sad and frustrated because it was so avoidable, it's such a common crash type, and a young girl was among the victims. I'm always more upset when kids are the victims. Fortunately, this thread has focused on aviation, stayed polite and pretty much on topic.