It looks like the pilot was trying to come down on blacktop somewhere and then the heli went straight into a hill.
The only reprieve is that it was fast.
9 people on it total.
No official statement on who other than Bryant. Coroner’s office will announce later.
4000 fpm with a sputtering engine. Not a controlled descent.
Climbing? Descending at 4,000 fpm don’t sound like climbing to me. Thanks for the info.
4000 fpm = 45mph, I would have thought that was survivable
4000 fpm descent?! It was dropping like a rock!
the turnabout at Pasadena: waiting for ATC Burbank/VanNuys?
passenger capacity 13? or 9?
Maybe loss of control due to IFR running into IFR conditions - sudden climb then rapid descent seems more like loss of control than engine failure.
I think we’ll have to wait for the radar returns to know exactly what happened, as well as any ATC communications. Also, some modern avionics record data that’s almost as good as a flight data recorder.
I don’t think the ADS-B returns are all that precise. The last moments of the flight probably aren’t represented.
Kobe was a philly boy and I am sorry God has called him home but can we get the same media exposure for the Marine that just got his brains blown out in some field in Afghanistan?? I have never needed a sports figure for anything. It’s a GAME. Sheesh.
You’re not going to survive 4000 FPM, that’s a descent rate of 66.66666666 ft/sec, you can’t hit that hard. I saw the effect on a full-size jet that hit at 1800 FPM, the airframe was a write-off and it’s amazing nobody died.
Correct me if I’m mistaken. Cannot a powerless helicopter autorotate down at relatively slow speeds?
At the very least, very low visibility was involved.
https://www.pprune.org/showthread.php?p=10672439
I live about 80 miles/130km SE from the crash site, but the terrain and microclimates are similar. I was mountain biking and there was a low-lying fog layer about 100-200 feet thick, with a broken around 3000-5000 feet (my estimate).
Another mountain biker and IFR-rated pilot was interviewed. He was first on the crash scene and said there was very dense fog with 3-4 feet of viz. They heard the S76 just before and during impact but did not see it. However, witnesses in the general area (I know those accounts turn out inaccurate) saw the helo “falter” and “sputter”, and then steeply descend. So there seemed to be good visibility elsewhere.
The coastal scud in that area blows in from the west along Hwy 101 and hugs low-lying terrain. My very early speculation- they were VFR on top over a patchy ground fog layer in the canyon. A mechanical issue forced a descent into IFR and terrain.
downdraft from a gust over the hills?
There’s video footage on instagram of the chopper going down. As I posted in the other thread, I’m no expert but this is how it looked: The whole craft was spinning wildly, and it looked like the main blade was still spinning. The chopper dropped fast and crashed with a big fireball. That area is very popular for hiking, so you could hear people screaming and strating to cry in the background. Pretty rough to watch.
I’m not getting anything from that link except a path along the ground. Click on what arrow again? I see no arrow.
any experienced pilots want to tell us less than amateurs what happened over Glendale?
It was IFR when I was at WHP at 10 this morning, I could see the pass in question from my hangar, Fog and Low Overcast all around the mountains surrounding the north,west and south valley.
Who cares?
TV and celebs are pretty much porn for the strange possessor who creates addictions that estrange the human from himself
The celebs who feed people’s demons their fix to keep the society and its gods appeased might just be feeding off of our souls and starving them. Anyways, once Kobe or Princess Diana dies and people freak out, it make one believe in the spiritualities within them that like watching themselves there at the expense of the possessed human