incredible helicopter crash

[Mickey1992]

Originally posted by Swoop
Why on earth would anyone in their right mind want to tune into a news program later on to see the heavy crane being used to remove the wreck?  In Britain this would be a 2 minute news report, no interviews with numpties pretending to be concerned, no returning to the site later to see the crane, no bollocks.

Swoop, correct me if I am wrong.  In England, isn't there only BBC, Sky, and ITV available for news programming?  And aren't all of these stations national?

[RTR]

Well he may have entered an auto rotation if he did have a tail rotor failure.

In order to get rid of the torque caused by driving the main rotor  you roll the throttle off to idle. Once the main rotor is not being driven by the engine, the torque drops off to practically nil. This would stop, or prevent the helicopter from spinning once thrust is gone from the tail rotor.

Certainly, whatever was the cause, the pilot was very busy and had to react quickly. Just the fact that everyone lived is evidence to the fact that he did a good job.

Cheers,
RTR

[Mickey1992]

Originally posted by RTR
Just the fact that everyone lived is evidence to the fact that he did a good job.

I agree.  If his forward momentum had not carried him off the edge of that building, it appears that it would have been a pretty good landing on that rooftop.

[AcId]

Swoop said numpties.

[RTR]

hmmm..just looked at the video again. The tail rotor was definetly turning, and looked to be under power (they tend to stop pretty quickly if the driveshaft shears).

I'm almost thinking that this was not a tail rotor failure, but a Hydraulic failure. This type of helicopter is a real bear without hydraulics. It is very difficult to control at low airspeed.

There have been recent Airworthiness directives issued to this helicopter type (AS350 series..made by Eurocopter) for hydraulic failures.

I didn't see the main rotor slowing down at all, and in fact the helicopter appeared to be under power the whole time. In autorotation it would have had a much higher rate of sink, and when arrested the main rotor would have slowed very quickly.

Be interesting to see what the cause finally turns out to be.

Cheers,
RTR

[Rino]

This story hits a little close to home, until just after 9/11 the
company that operates Chopper 4 was based at my FBO.  In fact,
this is the second chopper they've lost in 5 years.  The first one
was a year old EC-135 that went into the Passaic river,
fortunately the crew made it ok out of that one as well after
a catastrophic failure of the #1 engine.

     The aircrew are fine, but the management of this company
has a real tendency to operate "on the cheap".  It's gotten so
bad that they have alienated virtually every airport they've
operated out of.  I know for a fact they ran out in the middle
of the night owing my company for $8K of repairs on the AS-350.

     I just hope the next crew they sucker into flying has the same
good fortune the last two had when something went wrong.

     Rino

[rpm]

Originally posted by Rino
The aircrew are fine, but the management of this company
has a real tendency to operate "on the cheap".

That's not the way to operate ANY type of aircraft. Be sure the FAA and NTSB will be looking very closely at their maint records.

[Fishu]

Amazing nobody got hurt when coming down from the roof onto the other, that looked so big fall and the result was piece of aluminium crap on the roof - with people climbing out...
Lucky bastards!