Posted on 04/12/2025 9:56:21 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Years ago when I was in the Navy I accomplished the feat of being under the sea (submarine), on the sea (surface ship, LPH) and over the sea (helicopter). All of this in one day!
To be young and fearless again!
Yep, and you get to meet The Man should you not survive.
If the tail rotor fails, the pilot has one chance to react and autorotate; if the main rotor blade transmission seizes, the bird becomes a bowling ball.
This worried me, not because of the problems but that they were not fixed in a timely and competent manner resulting in passengers being inconvenienced. It was a sign, IMHO, that the employees were not problem solvers but defaulted to a script which was, frankly, stupid.
At the time I said that if they could not figure out how to solve these small problems without things ending up in a headline causing story that I worried about their ability to keep their machines flying.
I was told that I was foolish because the maintenance was done by UNION people who would never allow an unsafe aircraft to fly. Also that my assuming that various and repeated glitches in their service was a sign of a corporate culture that was not interested in doing their basic job was nonsense.
Well... here we are.
Small problems repeatedly uncorrected are indeed signs of an enterprise that is about to crash.
NOTHING to do with it. It was a transmission problem or engine/transmission abrupt seizer.
"If you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds."
-- Wilbur Wright, from an address to the Western Society of Engineers, 1901.
The rotor detached. Not even going to begin to speculate on what caused it, but clearly whatever went wrong was absolutely catastrophic
Surrounding an oil leak
Our Black Hawk unit deployed to Cambodia in the early 1990s. There was a row of those goofy looking things on the flight line at Phnom Penh. Our maintenance test pilot started schmoozing with the pilots and somehow talked them into letting him fly it. He said it wasn’t too bad.
Bad maintenance is the probable cause it seems. Anyone in military aviation understands that helicopters are very high maintenance and must be maintained. We learned that in Vietnam and probably in previous wars as well.
We’re guessing swashplate load-stress failure.
I had a handful of helicopter flights during my time in service. CH-53s we’re okay .
A CH-46 , with the 2 big rotors on top was another story, that thing shook like a washing machine with an unbalanced load. When we banked into a turn to align ourselves with the ship in preparation to land , the wobbling, rattling, and shaking was no joke.
I was glad to get away from that contraption.
Apparently the crewchief was incapable of tracking his bird. Congrats on surviving the 53 ride.
Exactly....
No, it’s called that because you must put all your faith in it. At least in the 1960s that was the explanation for the term.
bttt
Some of us are roosters.
Some of us are capons.
The two worst years for helicopter crashes in the last 20 (on record) in the US were 2013 and 2019. In each of those years there were 11 crashes involving fatalities.
In an average year, low (single digit) hundreds of Americans die in bathtub accidents (falls, drownings & scaldings).
In an average year, more than half a million Americans are transported to urgently-needed medical care in an air ambulance helicopter.
The highest accident rate (per hours of flight) for ‘copters is in agricultural use. Crop dusting.
Air ambulances and general aviation tie for second place, about 25% behind the crop dusters.
It’s less that helicopters are so much more dangerous than airplanes than it is that because of their unique capabilities, helicopters are almost constantly operating in an unavoidably more dangerous regime of flight.
‘Copters are more complex, to be sure, and have more single points of failure. And they have more quirky crap that can go wrong (if you want your mind blown, go to YouTube and search on “ground resonance”). But the biggest risk comes from always flying low-level, often by necessity flying beneath (and hence out of) controlled airspace and, MOST SIGNIFICANTLY, the higher rate of take-offs and landings than fixed wing. Taking off and landing are the two most dangerous phases of flight so it stands to reason that the more of them you have (over a significantly long timeline), the more accidents you’ll have.
NTSB finds tour helicopter that crashed into Hudson River was not equipped with any flight recorders
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