Another entry in the air tour operator hall of shame

[pembquist]

So you all have doubtless heard about the FlyNYON helicopter crash in NYC with 5 fatalities, the update is that maybe a passenger's harness flipped an emergency fuel cutoff. Regardless I don't know if any of you can digest this accident as happening to a reasonably diligent and circumspect operator who realizes that they are responsible for the lives of people's children, brothers, lovers etc. but I can't. I don't know if it is because I tend to have a worst case pessimism but the first time I read about their harness-tether-knife-safety-briefing-video I thought "you have got to be kidding."

https://nyti.ms/2pGu0EM

[colmbo]

Wow.  Surprising that the harnesses were attached with screw lock carabiners.  Personally I would not have done the ride.  I'm a bit anal about thinking "what if" and wouldn't have used a locked harness.  Just dumb to be tied to something that might sink or burn.

I think the pilot did a good job handling the power loss.

[bustr]

Long time ago when I climbed walls in the sierras, we used a large rescue carabiner as the central lock for belay stands augmented by up to two backup runners. Rescue carabiners were used by rescue professionals and other professions to have a large central locking attachment. Today they are called screw lock catabiners and there is one large problem with the threaded locking barrel. Everything from a bit of climbing chalk dust to a rapid temp change will cause the barrel to lock and become a PITA to unscrew. That is one of the reasons you carry a knife among many. You might have to cut your belay stand harness loose to keep climbing the next pitch. But, you won't be under water freaking out for your life. In my case, a sudden rain and sleet storm hit that had a 20% chance of coming near our location, dropping the temp from 80 down to 50 with wind, and we had to down climb a wall essentialy running with freezing water in shorts and T-shirts. And the big rescue carabiner threaded barrel froze from the rapid temp change.

From climbing experiences, until something unexpected and terrifying suddenly happens in the middle of your best thought out plans and polished skills. You are not prepared for how quickly your brain freezes becasue you cannot train for every horrifying experience to make your brain used to that experience. You can only hope you have enough skill and experience to muddle through. Showing non trained people where a knife is in a pouch and telling them in the case of an emergency, pull it out and cut your cord. Most people will have frozen in panic when the real thing suddenly happened. Something as simple as being dumped into a pool fully dressed in a harness, then expected to remember a knife in a pocket to save yourself has to be practiced. Exactly why the NAVY puts pilots through that in a pool with safety divers.

Makes you wonder if they used locking carabiners besides the safety reasons, to keep customers from unclipping to get the perfect selfies. Preoccupied people are not very brite about their surroundings.

[Puma44]

Wow.  Surprising that the harnesses were attached with screw lock carabiners.  Personally I would not have done the ride.  I'm a bit anal about thinking "what if" and wouldn't have used a locked harness.  Just dumb to be tied to something that might sink or burn.

I think the pilot did a good job handling the power loss.

I’m with you Colombo.  Safety first every time, all the time.  The average person off the street can be expected to vapor lock and panic in a non normal situation.  So very sad this happened needlessly.  I feel for the pilot, being the only one to survive.  That would haunt me for the rest of my life. 

[Traveler]

I worked in aviation-related business my entire life.  Five years with Eastern flying the line, before it went belly up.  Thirty-eight years running my own firm providing Aviation related services to Corporate Aviation Departments, Philip Morris, Mobil Oil, RJR, you get the idea.  I provided Training, Safety, and Compliance.  I spent a lot of time in 727’s G’3s, 4’s and 5’s.  I avoided every and any form of a helicopter.
 
That was based on my unreasonable fear of them.   I was aboard two that went down in Viet Nam, both UH1’s.  Both under direct enemy fire when they went down.  Both were successfully autorotated, one came down in a rice paddy and promptly fell over on its left side, thus trapping five guys under water.  The Second one came down on dry land, we hit very hard, so hard that the transmission dropped down from the overhead and crushed the three guys in the middle, then it fell over on its left side.

Just to many moving parts under a great deal of stress,  add to it, that at least in the case of the NYC sightseeing helicopter, poor design.       

[Oldman731]

Just to many moving parts under a great deal of stress

As they say:  A million parts, rotating rapidly around an oil leak, waiting for metal fatigue to set in.

- oldman

[bustr]

A postmortem article and very interesting read.


https://www.wired.com/story/helicopter-crash-harnesses-escape-training/

[pembquist]

That article is good at giving some sense of how ridiculous the safety training/harness situation was and hints a little at the character of the operator. I think the root cause, if you can say that, is simply the personalities of the owners of Liberty and FlyNYON. I don't know if in this it is stupidity married with an aggressive focus on sales or if it is some kind of personality disorder. There are a lot of businesses where it is appropriate for sales to be number 1 and maybe you should just ignore when your employees raise concerns about procedures, and maybe even a domineering management style is appropriate at times, flying tourists is not one of those businesses or times. I'm not a fan of aviation lawsuits but this is one case where I would be happy to see the family that owns these companies bankrupt, of course it doesn't work that way does it.

[Traveler]

I'm not a fan of aviation lawsuits but this is one case where I would be happy to see the family that owns these companies bankrupt, of course it doesn't work that way does it.

The Pilot in Command is responsible for the conduct and safety of this flight.  The families of the dead, their attornies are going to go after everyone, and the insurance companies are all going to turn on the Pilot in Command.  It was his sole responsibility if he felt that the flight was unsafe because of anything he was in command and should never have taken off. 

[bustr]

The Military trains for the possibility of survival after the aircraft hits the ground or water. This postmortem makes it sound like the civilian world looks at hitting the ground or water as outside of their control for passenger survival. Hitting the ground or water appears to be looked at as you are dead. And maybe so since you cannot force civilian passengers to go through hours of crash survival training like Military fliers. It's kind of obvious operating aircraft over water in manners like that tour with untrained civilian passengers is probably a death sentence for a statistical number. And I bet insurance companies know that. Why then do they allow it unless the number of yearly average accidents are so low that they can accept the consequences to their bottom line. Unless NY city and state see this one as a stain on their image and will now impose stricter conditions to operate air tours where before this kind of tour probably made them look good. Why else were they able to operate.....

[Traveler]

The Military trains for the possibility of survival after the aircraft hits the ground or water. This postmortem makes it sound like the civilian world looks at hitting the ground or water as outside of their control for passenger survival. Hitting the ground or water appears to be looked at as you are dead. And maybe so since you cannot force civilian passengers to go through hours of crash survival training like Military fliers. It's kind of obvious operating aircraft over water in manners like that tour with untrained civilian passengers is probably a death sentence for a statistical number. And I bet insurance companies know that. Why then do they allow it unless the number of yearly average accidents are so low that they can accept the consequences to their bottom line. Unless NY city and state see this one as a stain on their image and will now impose stricter conditions to operate air tours where before this kind of tour probably made them look good. Why else were they able to operate.....

Other operators have had aircraft land in the east river with no fatalities, depends a lot on time of year.  The water temp that day was 38 degrees.  If I remember my water rescue training that allows someone entering that cold water to swim for 50 feet or float for 50 seconds, before drowning.  From what I saw of the original video, part of the emergency float did not deploy, also it didn't look like an attempt to flair was made, the aircraft struck the water pretty hard, then rolled over and sank in 38 degree water. The pilot survived because he had put on his harness and removed his harness thousands of times prior to that flight.  Had the passengers gotten out, they still may not have survived.   

[pembquist]

The Pilot in Command is responsible for the conduct and safety of this flight.  The families of the dead, their attornies are going to go after everyone, and the insurance companies are all going to turn on the Pilot in Command.  It was his sole responsibility if he felt that the flight was unsafe because of anything he was in command and should never have taken off.

I agree with what you are saying, the stark terms are that if the pilot feels that it is unsafe he is duty bound to not take off. I also do not think that that exculpates the tour operator as I firmly believe that he would just find another pilot, and then another, and then another. I really cannot see the fault ending with the pilot and I feel the ultimate fault lies at the feet of the man in charge of the enterprise. Negligence of people lower in the hierarchy does not excuse negligence at the top. Nor stupidity which seems like the true reason the outcome of this accident was so terrible. I'm really speaking about moral issues not legal ones. It just strikes me as so obviously stupid to tie people in like that it makes me mad, even if there hadn't been an accident.

[Ripsnort]

I really have no desire to fly in something that has "no visible means of (aerodynamic) support".

That said, I always carry a very sharp knife with me. I wonder if I were a passenger on that tour, would I be allowed to carry it or do they go through some sort of TSA thingy?

[Mister Fork]

I really have no desire to fly in something that has "no visible means of (aerodynamic) support".

That said, I always carry a very sharp knife with me. I wonder if I were a passenger on that tour, would I be allowed to carry it or do they go through some sort of TSA thingy?

+1 on the aerodynamic support flying requirement for me as well.  I like the idea of heli's, I just don't like flying in them.

That said, after reading and watching all the video's related to the postmortem of the crash, the moment they were strapped in, they were doomed on any water entry. The supplied knife was useless to actually cut the tether. To top it off, trying to figure out how to get out of a heli, tethered in that you were shown moments how to undo on land, not in full pitch terror in pitch-black water at 38°F, they didn't have a chance.

This is a classic failure of the Swiss cheese safety-layer effect (as we call it in the airline industry.) Lots of small failures in each layer of safety protocols that led to one big accident.