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Posted
"This video has been removed due to terms of use violation."

 

I missed it.

 

 

It's also on the board here.

 

"Pilot will face charges of culpable homicide" :o

Posted
"This video has been removed due to terms of use violation."

 

I missed it.

 

 

Sorry guys, they must have just pulled it from youtube! It was on there earlier today.

 

Rob

Posted (edited)

It almost looked like he was trying to find a clear enough area to do a running take off, (ie going up the street instead of over the buildings) maybe he was overloaded?

Edited by klmmarine
Posted

This crash was discussed extensively on another heli site that shall remain unnamed. This information is second hand but I wouldnt post it if I doubted its veracity.

 

 

This crash was discussed extensively on another heli site that shall remain unnamed. This information is second hand but I wouldnt post it if I doubted its veracity.

Sadly, the pilot was killed, fortunately no pax or bystanders were . There are two working theorys about the cause. Some suspect an engine failure due to the right yaw before the impact. The second theory, and the one I suspect, is that the ship, a BA A-star, was overloaded on a high DA day. Someone said a DA of 6700'. It was also reported that he had tried a max performance t/o but had been unsuccessful and tried a running t/o, failed to achieve ETL and drooped Nr trying to abort. The right yaw in this case would be the pilot letting out a little pedal in an attemp to feed more power to the main rotor.

Posted

Except the AStar rotor turns the other way. So, trying to get extra MR torque by reducing TR torque would show a left yaw. Correct?

 

The news report says that the driver of the car behind the truck was killed, and if you watch the video, you can see the windshield shatter as the helicopter noses over the truck.

 

If you watch him attempting takeoff, he is yawed tail left, which is him attempting to reduce that TR demand, most likely he yaws right after the low rpm horn/audio sounds and he pretty much, probably settles into the truck with nowhere to go because he has nothing left to pull.

 

What it looks like happened is that he attempted the takeoff, saw he wasn't going to make it, attempted to stop (man off camera says, "He's trying to reverse his chopper...no, he doesn't have the time"), found himself OGE, drooped the rotor and started looking for a place to put it as he began to settle. The right yaw to line himself up with his (intended?) landing area probably didn't help matters. To me, it looks like he left himself no out when his plan went bad.

 

Anyone have access to the South African CAA report?

Posted

There could be many reasons but it appears he backed himself into a corner, figuratively and literally.

 

It's possible that once he was out far enough from the protection of being wedged in that corner ( it appears that the building wrapped to the left judging by the landscape in the first frame and obviously to the right where the people were filming) he hit a tail wind coming down that road. I say this because he seems to loose altitude right at that point when he would loose protection from the buidling - aka arriving at the corner of the intersection. Also, watch the smoke after the AC settles, it all blows downwind at a pretty fast clip. Had it been a head wind I assume it would have blown back over the AC toward the camera man?

 

Either way, it's bad. I don't particularly enjoy watching it but considering my last lesson was confined area operations, it brings home my instructor's words "don't land anywhere you are not sure you can get out safely"

Posted

John,

 

If you watch the palm trees that are in the picture before it zooms in on the helicopter, there isn't much movement there, and they would be in near the same wind condition. A wind indicated by the movement of the smoke should have enough speed to affect the palm trees where we would be able to see. IMO, the source of the smoke and its direction is the engine and its exhaust.

 

Turbines have a tendency to keep running in an accident, even when the aircraft ends up on its side, or upside down, until it is starved of fuel or has a catastrophic mechanical failure. I think this is partly because most turbine engines have a fuel pump internal to their fuel control, although the manufacturers I'm familiar with put boost fuel pumps in the tanks to push the fuel from the tank.

 

Of course, all this bolsters my pet opinion, so feel free to disagree/disregard.

Posted

It looks like his skid went thru the drivers side window of the truck, which is what gave him a pivot point to roll over on....bottom line, he lost lift for some reason and didnt have a lot of options where to put it. Probably was hoping he could hop over those two cars to land on the roadway..I've seen so much worse accidents where all survived, I am actually surprised this was a fatal....5 feet off the ground, 5 MPH groundspeed...pretty sad either way.Goldy

Posted

There was a second thread on another forum about this accident that had the following link:

 

http://www.702.co.za/news/helicopter.asp

 

The guy in the car behind the truck is the one that died, not the pilot of the helicopter. Helicopter may not have had that much energy, but the blades sure did.

Posted
There was a second thread on another forum about this accident that had the following link:

 

http://www.702.co.za/news/helicopter.asp

 

The guy in the car behind the truck is the one that died, not the pilot of the helicopter. Helicopter may not have had that much energy, but the blades sure did.

 

 

Thanks for clarifying Linc....makes sense now.

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