TV Helo Midair Collision

[eagl]

Originally posted by DREDIOCK
I just watched this...several times to make sure I wasnt just imagining it.
There is something else the chopper pilot is uttering right at the very very end.
 

What was he saying?

[tedrbr]

Originally posted by soda72
Yeah that one is disturbing, you can hear him scream...

It doesn't seem safe to have the pilot talking to an anchor, while watching the guy in the vehicle and flying all at the same time espically with all the other helicopters around in the same arena reporting on the same event..

People get in enough accidents in their cars talking on a cell phones..

soda72, the pilot is not the one talking to the television station folks.  The guy on the camera is.  The pilot is talking to local air traffic control, and probably the other local choppers, but as a chase is so unpredictable, coordinating airspace between a half dozen news choppers, and 1 or 2 police choppers, is as impossible a task as you are likely to find.

If you've ever seen those news choppers trying to jockey for position for a good camera shot.... it's a competitive market for the "if it bleeds, it leads" media.   I feel especially sorry for the Police chopper crews that have to worry about what is going on on the ground in addition to the idiots buzzing over them in news choppers.

[Maverick]

Originally posted by eagl
What was he saying?

Frankly, Eagle do you really think it matters? It's after the impact.

[soda72]

Originally posted by tedrbr
soda72, the pilot is not the one talking to the television station folks.  The guy on the camera is.  The pilot is talking to local air traffic control, and probably the other local choppers,

Are you sure he wasn't talking to the anchor?

The video doesn't indentify who the anchor is talking to, but the article from ABC15 web site says it was Smith..   And it matches up with what was said in the video..  Maybe they have the names mixed up with Rick Krolak..

ABC15 Pilot Craig Smith saw the driver get out of the first truck.
"This may be the end of this thing," he said on-air. "OK, now it's a foot chase."Police were trying to stop the motorist from leaving in the second vehicle when Smith's helicopter and Channel 3's collided. "Oh geez!" was all viewers could hear Smith say as his broadcast broke up in a jumble of spinning, broken images.

http://www.abc15.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=3440f3ba-b741-47ee-948b-d82997dcdeda


http://www.breitbart.tv/html/3645.html

[tedrbr]

Originally posted by soda72
Are you sure he wasn't talking to the anchor?

The video doesn't indentify who the anchor is talking to, but the article from ABC15 web site says it was Smith..   And it matches up with what was said in the video..  Maybe they have the names mixed up with Rick Krolak..

http://www.abc15.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=3440f3ba-b741-47ee-948b-d82997dcdeda

http://www.breitbart.tv/html/3645.html

If the pilot at the controls was giving the commentary, that would be very much out of the norm for how those news camera helicopter crews tend to operate, and will probably be listed as a major cause of the crash by the NTSB.   Pilot should be listening to his radios, not the news director and anchors.  

Or, it could simply be bad information in the article due to rush to get statements out... something that would be covered in those small "corrections" boxes on page 2 no one ever reads.

[Meatwad]

Originally posted by soda72
Yeah that one is disturbing, you can hear him scream...

It doesn't seem safe to have the pilot talking to an anchor, while watching the guy in the vehicle and flying all at the same time espically with all the other helicopters around in the same arena reporting on the same event..

People get in enough accidents in their cars talking on a cell phones..

I never noticed it until now.


Very disturbing and sad

[FiLtH]

Him being responsible for their deaths is foolish. If they were COPters then yes.

[Atoon]

Condolences to family & friends of the lost souls.

[Gunslngr]

I used to work for a Repair Station that maintained two of the News
Helicopters for the Valley (Phoenix), not the two involved in the crash.

My own experiance in talking with these pilots on daily basis was quite different from the picture that some are painting.

We had two "Rival" TV stations helicopters based at our station but the pilots and photographers shared the same office, listened to the same scanners, drank coffee from the same pot. Etc

They were very professional, cooperately closely with each other and any law enforcement helicopters in the air. With the new gyro-stabilized long range cameras in the choppers they could maintain a safe distance from the scene and each other and still cover the story.  

What happend in Phoenix was tragedy, a brief but fatal lapse of situational awareness. If friendly collsions were turned on in Aces High most of us would be dead a hundred times over.

For many of you, this was just a news story. For me, it was half hour of wondering if the crash had taken the lives of people that I had worked with for several years.

[rpm]

Well said, Guns. I hope none of the victims were friends of yours.

[lazs2]

the actual accident itself if tragic.

The reason they were in it is not.   It is disgusting.  TV news is disgusting.   they are vultures and liars and scumbags at those stations.  

What they pass off as news holds no interest for me.

lazs

[Flatbar]

I've logged over 450 hours in helicopters working as a vidiographer/photographer.

*I've also logged around 300 hours as a front seat observer. There's a reason why these two jobs are seperated while working in a high traffic area.

Unfortunatley, the bottom line trumps safety all too often.

*These were the safety procedures taken and enforced during the Valdez spill by Exxon and their contractors. Their safety record during the 5 years of heavy air traffic in the sound reflects the benifits of their saftey efforts.