Fox News get it wrong

[Rooster]

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/08/23/he ... shows.html

/sigh
I’ve seen this so often over the course of my career where a news agency or channel reports on something to do with helicopters and completely muffs it up as to the reasons an accident occurs. In this video you see a B206 helicopter running on a trailer when all of a sudden it lifts off and catches a skid resulting in it flipping over. The story according to Fox is that a new battery was installed and the pilot was going to fly around to see if it was working properly.
:doh:
No, no, and no. That is not what is happening in the video. The helo was in the parking area doing a run-up, that much we can see, but the cowling over the cockpit has been removed, meaning some work had likely been done on the hydraulics, which on this bird is where they are located. There’s not much else up there except some wiring for a couple of antennas. The pilot was in the sun and it was hot inside the cockpit, so he opened the door to get some breeze through there. He’s on the trailer because it makes it easy to pull the bird out of the hangar when it’s time to go fly. Other programs use ground handling wheels, but a trailer makes it convenient.

So the pilot is at the controls and you can tell the throttle is at idle by the blade count or the speed of the rotors. He may be texting or just daydreaming, but he is not cognizant of the wind which is picking up rapidly. All of a sudden the helicopter begins to fly, but not very well since the rotor speed is so low, but with enough of a headwind it will pick up and waffle around— as it did here. The guy notices the helicopter is getting light on the skids and has enough forward cyclic in the controls that it propels the trailer with the helicopter still on it ahead a couple of feet.

Now at this moment, he is probably wondering just what is happening, but his door is open and that distracts him enough to not roll the throttle up as fast as he can, because already he knows he is in trouble with his boss or maintenance manager who comes out of the building to tell him to put it back on the ground. So now he is split between reacting appropriately by getting airborne as fast as he can or trying to keep it on the trailer and maybe just take an ass chewing for not paying attention to what is going on around him. However, by that time it’s too late because a 206 will fly (badly) if enough wind is off the nose and due to the aerodynamics that pertain to a helicopter, even a tiny bit of forward movement like the trailer rolling ahead significantly reduces the amount of collective or power it takes to get airborne.

Up, up, and away! The bird flies like a drunken sailor at those rotor speeds and is very difficult to control. Any input at all results in excessive movement unlike when it is at full throttle, so as the pilot overcorrects as it lifts off the sled, he steers it left, then right and catches the skid on the trailer after he dings the stinger off the ground. He is likely hearing crunching sounds as the Night Sun is being ruined which adds to his distress, but then BOOM! he hits that critical angle from which there is no recovery and the helicopter flips over.

He had two options as soon as the wind picked up: Either kill the engine ASAP and throw on the rotor brake or run the engine up to fly and prepare to hover in the wind. He did neither and broke a perfectly good helicopter.

It’s a good video to teach a pilot a whole bunch of things about flying, one being that you don’t need to run up an aircraft after a battery change. Just flip the switch and look at the voltage meter.

[Goober McTuber]

So you didn't get hurt, did you?

[Rooster]

Heheh, nope.
Loved the part where the guy with the Mexican bagpipes keeps walking back and forth with his head down by the hangar. Completely oblivious to the tail rotor and what is about to occur.

[Rooster]

True story.
I was early in my career as a helicopter pilot and was working in the Guff. That’d be the Gulf of Mexico for you who don’t speak coonass. I’d been there building time a couple of years, so I was feeling salty with myself and so did some things which in retrospect were dangerous to say the least.

It was hurricane season and sure enough one was predicted to come through the oil fields of Louisiana. As is normal all the crew on the different platforms that are in the predicted path vacate the area in advance of the storm, however, the field boss in my patch wanted to wait until the last possible moment to evacuate. As it turned out, the storm made its way straight through our block and so by the time I was instructed to move the roughnecks and staff back to the beach the winds were picking up rapidly.

I was flying a B206 just like the one in the video and was doing a blazing 40 knots into the wind, but screaming back to the beach doing 175 knots— which is Millenium Falcon-like speeds for a Jet Ranger. The trouble was the winds were picking up so fast that I was getting into difficulty with gusts and turbulence. Fortunately for me, a couple of other helicopters in the area helped with the evac, so I was on my final run offshore.

When I got to the platform I made my approach, but found that I couldn’t set the bird down on the deck because the winds were so high that even at flat pitch (no power applied) the helicopter just hovered about 8 feet over the deck. I messed around a bit and figured out that I could drive the bird onto the helipad by moving forward with no power, but the guys were going to have to wait until I just touched down and then run out under the rotor system and jump on the skids to weigh down the aircraft. I called them on the radio and had them set up.

It went perfect and the oil hands managed to keep the bird on the deck long enough to get in, strap the seatbelts on, and close the doors— which wasn’t a problem, except when trying to open them in the teeth of the storm. We took off and got back to the beach without incident, but when I look back on that I can think of a dozen different awful outcomes that could have happened.

Guys running into the tail rotor.
One side loading up with a couple of people, but the other side not having anyone, yet still light enough to fly (like the guy in the video) and flipping over.
Running off the platform with guys hanging on the outside and not getting inside in time.
A gust of wind causing the main rotors to dip down and decapitating someone.
Guys slipping in the wind and water on the deck while running (a very serious no-no) and sliding off the platform into the water 200 feet below.
Mangling the approach because the aircraft’s controllability at low power setttings is far weaker.

[Rooster]

It was one of those situations in life that you do something without putting a lot of thought into it at the time, but later you recognize that God watches out for fools and drunks, but you weren’t drinking at the time. I did a lot of stupid stuff when I was younger, between being highly impulsive and just dumber than a box of rocks. Thankfully, as time passes and I have been given the opportunity to assimilate the lessons of my near misses and mistakes in life, I hope that I am a wee bit wiser than that foolish young man of 28.

I’ve been fortunate though. Not an accident or incident in 34 years of flying. Been plenty of close calls though, some of my own making, some entirely by happenstance.

[Derron]

It’s a good video to teach a pilot a whole bunch of things about flying

The thing it should teach people is not to fly helicopters. After seeing a clutch come apart and the fucking thing fall out of the sky and kill two people, that was more than enough to reinforce my belief that wings are the best thing.