I am an experienced helicopter pilot in SoCal familiar with crash area. Ask me anything.

:(

There’s no way of knowing, but it would have been a pretty big coincidence if it occurred right at the exact time when the flight path crossed the lower terrain to the higher terrain and they lost sight of the freeway.

Having said that, the amount of fear induced by the entry into the clouds and resultant adrenaline dump would have physiological effects. They always conduct tests on the pilot’s blood or tissue, mainly for drugs or alcohol, but may test for other things as well. There may be chemical markers in the tissue if indeed there was a heart attack, which the medical examiner will report to the NTSB.

Any doctors in the house care to comment?

The aircraft was in a dive at this point

Thanks for answering my Qs. But, let's look at this image:

[link to www.gannett-cdn.com (secure)]

Pilot was going down fast for no reason. He was way over all those hills. He was going to crash no matter if those hills were there or not. And if as you think he went up into the clouds and lost seeing, he would have regained them upon going down. The narrative you gave of him flying up into the clouds and then hitting the mountain is TOTALLY incompatible with that image above.

Why didn't they just land the helicopter somewhere? That is what I don't understand. You read stories of people crash landing planes on highways in an emergency, couldn't they have just landed this somewhere as an emergency? Not at the end, once the pilot was disoriented, but before it got to that point? Or why didn't they? The pilot didn't want to lose face? I'm sure those 9 people would prefer to be alive.

That image is a representation of the aircraft’s transponder data that sites like flightaware and flightrader24 utilize to show aircraft flight paths. At the last shown point on that depiction, where the aircraft’s transponder return is lost, the aircraft is still in the clouds pointed downward.

ATC radar data tracked the aircraft further, where it’s descent rate reached 4,000 feet per minute and the airspeed reached 184 mph, which is a pretty steep dive.

If you saw any news photos from the canyon floor looking up toward the aircraft, especially the one with the fire aircraft hovering up the hillside, you see that the cloud base was only 100-200 ft above the ground there. They exited the clouds in an extreme nose down attitude, perhaps even inverted, without sufficient time to recover.

..THE MAMBA WAS STILL A SUBJECT OF LITIGATION WITH BIG PHARMA....UH.

ITZ UH 1991 STILL CALL IT AN S76 OR S76 B ..BIT IT'S A 40 YR OLD METAL FATIGUE RUSSIAN ..HAS BEEN...MADE DURING THE WALL COMING DOWN PERIOD!...FINALLY FAILED QUALITY CONTROL!

That's Very good possibilty too. And why wasn't there another pilot?

I wondered if the controllers keep the aircraft in a holding pattern in hopes he would change his mind and land before going on with the special VFR. What do you think Max?

Just to back you up, my husband has a helicopter pilot license and he said something similar, but he always assumes pilot error first.

Several witnesses said it was flying very low. In Socal we hear helicopters all the time and absolutey could tell if it was unusually low, even if it was shrouded in fog.

We have enhanced GPWS on our airline birds terrain shows up nicely. I would think with today avionics this would be available to general aviation maybe it is and has been don't know I just tend to concentrate on our aircraft.

This is the $1,000,000 question. It’s the key to the entire phenomenon of CFIT accidents. (Controlled Flight Into Terrain)

The short answer is yes, they should have landed. The best choice would have been at Van Nuys airport as they were passing by, but then somewhere else along the way, like a large field.

Absolutely, YES.

There is a psychological barrier to doing that. In another response I outlined how a pilot’s pride and psyche is interwoven into getting the job done. Some points to ponder:

- Flying Kobe was probably the pinnacle of this pilot’s career. Stranding Kobe in a field with no preparations was not palatable. The pilot can explain how he saved all their lives, but you can’t really prove it. And besides, so-and-so never got me stranded in a field and always got me there. You see where this is going.

- The Van Nuys helicopter environment (where this aircraft is based) is pretty competitive. This pilot was lucky enough to get a seat in the company’s biggest aircraft, flying the best clients and there’s 50 guys behind him who want that job.

- No one wants to inconvenience the celebrity. They may take their business to another company or request another pilot.

- There may have been discussions about being late and it’s just a few miles up the road. There is no cockpit recorder, so we’ll never know the discussion.

- “It can never happen to me”. That’s an unspoken belief many people have in their day-to-day lives. He was an instrument instructor, but may have never flown actual IFR in the clouds. Helicopter IFR is hard to get outside of the military. He may have been overconfident in his abilities to fly out of a bad situation, so he flew further into it.

We’ll never know the pilot’s thoughts as he progressed along the flight. What we do know is that it is not unique to him. Dozens, or in fact hundreds, of pilots have made the same decision.

That’s what is troublesome about the “JUST LAND” response, which we hear even from our aviation CEOs, managers and industry leaders. It ignores the fact that there must other forces at work, which are interfering in this otherwise, common sense decision.

What I suggested in the other response is that it is always wise to have a complete backup plan fully in place that includes ground transportation with enough time to reach the destination on time. Your company is providing transportation services from A to B, not all of it has to be in the helicopter. This small inconvenience will be quickly forgotten and the pilot still gets the job done. That makes it past the psychological barrier of abandoning plan A. Always have a well-developed plan B!

As to fast or slow...a helicopter has controls? A pilot has a means to increase or decrease speed, whether or not they can see. Wouldn't the safer thing to do if you cannot see be to use controls to reduce speed? Once it went into a dive why no correction? Everyone suggests pilot error but it also seems this could have been an intentional act. Not saying it was, just that it should be considered.

The best witness I heard was the gentleman wearing the TWA cap, who was at the base of the hill where the helicopter crashed and yes, the helicopter was quite low there and crashed only seconds later.

You still need to see or reference flight instruments to make the appropriate corrections, otherwise you are likely compounding the problem.

I agree. I heard there was a fire before they hit anything. And fog wouldn't start a fire in the helicopter. Someone with a video I think saw it.

i heard this too ..that it went down faster than it was traveling, as if the force from a missile, bomb, bad part, gunshot, dew threw it into an accelerated descent.

Ok, I understand the psychological aspect of not wanting to land and the pressure to deliver for a high power client. But then why wouldn't the flight control tower order him to land somewhere? He can't see clearly, there's fog. Police helicopters have been grounded. If he was "ordered" to land somewhere he could blame it on the flight tower and not him? Of course maybe he'd get fired or never fly for big profile celebrities again, but it would have let him save face. Or is this type of an order something that just wouldn't really be done? It just makes me sad that it seems like this accident was preventable, and just thinking about how they were on this plane, going in circles for a LONG time I am having a hard time believing 5 adult passengers did not say to the pilot or to one another screw it let's just land this thing somewhere I don't care where just put me on the GROUND.

Two very good questions
1) Why wasn’t there a second pilot?
2) Why wasn’t the flight conducted under IFR?

The main answer is cost. The company was not required to fly dual pilot or IFR, which adds significant cost to the operation, so they didn’t. As long as market forces allowed them, they would have continued to do it.

I expect some sort of re-writing of the FARs due to the high profile nature of this accident and the public outcry.

Some insurance companies require CEOs and other VIPs to only be flown by Dual Pilot, IFR operations with minimum pilot qualifications to include Factory training in an aircraft no older than ______and a whole laundry list of other things. It raises the bar, but apparently was not the case here.

Not really. 4,000 feet per minute descent rate converts to about 45 miles per hour downward, while it was traveling 184 miles per hour forward. It’s just a steep dive, which accounts for its high airspeed.

In Special VFR conditions, only one aircraft is allowed in the surface area of controlled airspace at one time and Burbank was busy with IFR traffic, who take priority. So the holding is explainable, but there’s no way to know if ATC turned him a few extras times to make him think. Could be.

You can feel speed. If I were on a rollercoaster with a blindfold on and earplugs, I would still know if I was going faster or slower or up vs down. Is there a manual throttle that can be used to slow in a case where a pilot cannot use/referrence instruments?
You are quite informative, thanks.

Exactly. They had their kids on there. They saw the fog, knew they were circling. I find it impossible to believe they would risk their kids' lives just to get to a practice/game. I hope all possibilities are being looked at.

If you have a link for that, I’d love to see it.

Witness statements, though, are notoriously inaccurate in aviation accidents to include, “It threw a blade”, “The engine was sputtering”, “It was on fire”. These are the most common and easily disproved by crash debris and reconstruction. The post crash fire was due to Jet fuel from the ruptured fuel cell being ignited by hot engine debris.

The best witness I heard was the gentleman in the TWA cap who was right beneath the final flight path of the aircraft and watched it strike the hillside. He didn’t mention it being on fire prior.

OP..SOME FOLKS GOT OFF AND DID NOT FLY..SO, IT WOULD HAVE HAVE MORE PEOPLE AND THEIR GEAR IN IT...EVEN HEAVIER! 40 YR OLD CHOPPUH WITH A DOZEN OR MORE ON IT..IN BAD FOG...JUST SAYIN...IT WAS DHOOMED...

Exactly. They had their kids on there. They saw the fog, knew they were circling. I find it impossible to believe they would risk their kids' lives just to get to a practice/game. I hope all possibilities are being looked at.


They were up circling and flying around a long time. Even 60 seconds is a very long time when you are facing a potential catastrophe, and this was like 10 or 15 MINUTES of panicked we can't see, we're flying in circles behavior. I'm sure there are text messages sent during this course of time. Again I understand the psychological aspects of the pilot not wanting to do his job, but what about 5 adults and 3 freaked out 13 year olds? I'm sure this was incredibly terrifying and any one of them (especially KB) could have just said put this down somewhere now. Or maybe they didn't grasp the severity of the situation?

About 25 years ago I was on an airplane that was about 10 feet from landing on the runway when all of a sudden it swooped back up and we're all like hey what's going on? The pilot comes over the loudspeaker and basically says hey folks, sorry about that, looks like we were about to land on someone else's runway. We'll have you back down in a few minutes. Cool as a cucumber. I think literally we were probably less than 15 seconds away from a collision with another plane but the way he described it it was like no biggie, just tried to land on the wrong runway but ops there was a jumbo jet there so we'll try again. It's possible the helicopter pilot was just telling them we're circling until the fog lifts and we'll be on our way? This all just seems so preventable with numerous opportunities to land somewhere why didn't one of these 5 adults insist on it?

Is it normal for helicopters to not have a black box? I read it's not "required."

As odd as this sounds, ATC is not allowed to counsel pilots on flight conditions.

When we used to get in-person briefings with Flight Service briefers before everything went automated, they used to end briefings like this with “VFR flight not recommended”. That was as far as they ever got to telling you not to go.

Helicopters are jacks of all trades and rules are written to not hinder any segment of the industry. The helicopter regulations are very lenient to allow for operations like crop-dusting, sling loading and logging to occur near the ground at slower airspeeds and in poorer weather conditions, because they are always in position to land and routinely do. The same regs apply for everybody though. It was not specifically intended to allow an aircraft to fly at 150 kts just below the cloud layer, but it does not restrict one from doing so either.

If a pilot requests vectors or declares an emergency, ATC will do everything in their power to help.