This is Fisher Plaza where KOMO news is located. You can see the helipad very easily.
Posted on 03/19/2014 6:12:37 PM PDT by PROCON
Very sad about the copter crash in Seattle the other day, with loss of life, but here is my input as a former Army/Vietnam aviator. As the eye-witness accounts said that the copter, which looked liked a Bell Ranger, or an OH-58 as I remember it, they said that as the copter lifted off of the helipad it dipped and started to rotate, which may be a sign of a tail rotor failure. If the tail rotor failed for some reason, there is no control of left/right lateral movement. The copter is then helpless and out of control, and it crashed unfortunately. The reason I even bring this up is that the same thing happened to me in Nam, we were hovering, coming in for landing on the flightline with A Troop, 1st Sqdn, 9th Cav in Songbe, when we had a tailrotor failure, and except for the skill of the pilot we crashed and lived. Just saying, this Seattle crash reminds me of the same situation.
He was right. Tail rotor failure is pretty hard to recover from at a hover. It gets even worse if a portion of the tail rotor seperates from the aircraft because it affects the CG of the aircraft, which further affects controllibility. Your best hope is to fly out of it with forward cyclic if you have the altitude, gain and maintain airspeed via translational lift, reduce collective and streamline the aircraft to reduce torque effect and gain directional control. Then you need to find a suitable landing area to execute a run on landing and gradually reduce collective as you touchdown.
FRiend, the only thing I remember from the crash is that my pilot did the right thing and that he was cool and saved my and his life ( and a Vietnamese interpreter) , if I hadn’t lived I wouldn’t have 2 great adult kids right now :-)
Always a good thing...Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.
he he
the tail would have straightened out the ship a little, not perfect, but slow the spin as long as you had forward flight, but that is not a speed I would like to hit a brick wall at unless I was in the back seat with pillows all in the front seat
Romulan Tail rotor device. Fer sher.
I flew in a chithook once.
70-71
2Plt919EngrCo
Ill never forget the day we lost an engine over australia, we made it back to the ship but when we landed, the crash crew was ready, hoses out, suits on...
quite the memorable trip :)
Given enough altitude and velocity, a tail rotor failure can be compensated for by entering autorotation and thus eliminating the main body torque. If they were operating inside the height/velocity curve, a tail rotor failure is usually catastrophic.
news/traffic copters... —>
huge waste of fuel and equipment
Can’t recall if it was a freeper or elsewhere that mentioned this building (6 stories) is not high enough to give you the altitude to recover if something goes wrong on takeoff. My thinking: if you are two feet up and 20-feet over on the ground it is no big deal to “crash” the two feet, but on a building...
Another guy on the news said his office looks out over the helipad, and he saw the chopper land, the pilot got out with a flashlight and inspected some things, then got back in and took off again. (And crashed). I imagine they will be interviewing that guy if he recalls what parts of the craft were being inspected.
Who knows what prompted the pilot to check on things. But I was reminded of the odd noises on my truck that I keep telling myself “I better get that checked some day when I have time.”
However it happened the witnesses saw the aircraft spinning left which does indicate a loss of tail rotor effectiveness. The blades on the AS-350 go the wrong way.
An additional challenge for the pilot would be the height of the helipad on the building. As soon as you move away from that pad, you are in helicopter no-man's land. Too high for a hovering autorotation, too low for a zero airspeed auto, too slow for a regular auto, too slow for the tail fin to counter the main rotor torque. Every time that pad is used the aircraft has to fly through that regime, both landing and taking off.
“Can’t recall if it was a freeper or elsewhere...”
Freeper! Thanks usnbandit.
I was heading that direction that morning but took I-90 across instead upon hearing the news 15 minutes after it happened. Weird to hear of that kind of thing in a place that is so familiar.
The burn victim is improving:
“Richard Newman, the 38-year-old Seattle man who suffered severe burns after a KOMO-TV helicopter crashed and fell on his car Tuesday morning, is “improving, conscious and breathing on his own,” according to officials at Harborview Medical Center.
Newman remains in serious condition in the hospital’s intensive care unit....”
“An update on the crash from the National Transportation Safety Board is scheduled for 3 p.m. Wednesday.”
As an intermediate R/C heli/helo pilot, yes, this happens all the time.
Most R/C heli main rotors spin in the same direction as the Eurocopter if I’m reading this right. Lose tail, nose left. Often a gyro or radio problem in the models.
But the comment about snagging a cable is a possibility, too.
Too bad the ‘what’s name’ from Microsoft wasn’t aboard the helicopter.
I once saw a pilot put his tail rotor into a tree on takeoff. He said everything felt fine and the aircraft was still responsive. He decided to error on the side of caution and set it down for inspection. Once the rotors came to a stop, the tail rotor fell apart.
I learned rich there that if you even suspect a problem with the tail rotor, take no chances, it is after all the number one cause of helicopter crashes.
I spent most of the day flying an AS-350 around Seattle. That was creepy.
Me too, a couple of times. Shook like crazy. But I’m still around, so those missions came off.
Welcome Home!
What’s so bad about flying an AS-350?
At my old Job, we had a Jet Ranger on approach to our rooftop Helipad experience a Turbine Failure.
Had it happened a few seconds sooner, the Helicopter would have crashed into the side of the Building. Instead, the Pilot got it on the Roof. It hit so hard that the entire Tail Boom broke off. The Pilot and passenger suffered back injuries but they walked away.
They had a Sky Crane lift it off the roof and it was Rebuilt. Saw it flying a Year later.
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