I don’t remember it, but my parents tell me that, when I was a very little boy, they took me on a helicopter flight that landed on a Manhattan rooftop (the Pan Am Building, maybe?) and that I crouched low and scuttled away from the helicopter to avoid the rotors - even though I was so small I could’ve stood on tiptoes and still been in no danger.
If they’re paying attention to that, they don’t walk into it.
The problem is that most of us spend a lot more time in highly familiar surroundings than we think we do. So we’re usually moving around on mental autopilot. When placed in a truly novel situation, we get at least a little confused & have a strong tendency to get focused on one thing to the exclusion of all else around us.
All the complaints about people freezing up & just standing there after entering a large building or getting off an escalator or elevator are mini versions of this same feature of human nature.
Little kids are famous for running after balls & right out into traffic with nary a thought to anything but the ball. Adults are a lot more like that than you expect, when placed in a novel circumstance.
Given a strange situation, a bunch of noise, a bunch of distraction, and all the rest, some folks some times will get boresighted on walking from here to there with no thought about what’s between here & there.
The loud noise should tip people off, but it becomes ubiquitous, especially as the flight progresses. It’s still loud, but the noise fades into the background. After a while a person might not associate the noise with the nearly invisible spinning metal thing.
After I left USAF & before I hired on with the airlines I briefly had a job flying tourists into the Grand Canyon. We used planes like this Piper PA-31 Navajo - Wikipedia, carrying one pilot & 9 passengers. In that wiki if you scroll down to the second picture you can see the open passenger door at the left rear.
Our company provided services to tour groups, so typically we had 30-90 passengers split amongst 4 to 10 airplanes. All the airplanes parked pretty much side by side & nose to tail in a compact rectangle of airplanes. Once everybody was aboard all the planes we’d start up en masse, taxi out as a big group, takeoff one after the other & proceed with the tour.
At arrival we’d be more spread out, so as each airplane pulled up to park the preceding airplanes would already be fully debarked or the pax would just be getting off. One of the pilot’s many tasks was to keep control of all 9 pax & carefully herd them safely away from the other arriving airplanes and into the terminal.
What made this more fun was the customers were almost all from Hong Kong or Taiwan (back in the 80’s mainland Chinese tourists didn’t exist) & nobody spoke much English. We were taught some pidgin Mandarin like “please”, “thank you”, “come here”, “go there” and that was it. A lot of pointing & pantomime was part of the job. And like all tourists they loved cameras & picture taking.
You can probably see where this is going …
I pull up to park, #3 of 8 airplanes. I shut down, get out, and start to gather my folks just outside the door of my plane. One of the later passengers was elderly & needed my full attention to get down the little stairs (just visible in the 2nd wiki photo behind the left landing gear). She gets both feet unsteadily to the ground & I turn around to count heads. In the barely 10 seconds that took, one of my younger charges has trotted 20 or so feet off my left wingtip so he could take a picture of the airplane & the people.
He’s standing exactly where the next plane will park. He’s looking through a viewfinder totally oblivious to the approaching airplane now about 30 ft away & aimed right for where he’s standing. There’s enough noise from all the other airplanes that there’s no way he’s going to recognize that one sound approaching.
So I take off running like mad right *towards *where this prop is gonna be in just a few seconds. I’m shouting & waving. Fortunately I was within his viewfinder so he took down the camera, looked around & sprinted for safety. He was about 5 seconds from being burger.
And the pilot of the other plane? Not God’s gift to aviation, but not a total boob either. The spot he was fitting into between the other planes was pretty narrow, maybe 2’ of clearance between his wingtips & the planes on each sides. He did what we all did, which was aim a little snug on the left side because we had a better view that way & could judge that clearance more accurately. If the left was tight enough, the right had to end up OK. He was totally boresighted those last 5 ft on ensuring his left wing didn’t collide with the airplane to his left. So he wasn’t looking at all to his right where my pax had run into his path.
Yet another reason I quit that job. We didn’t use marshallers to save money. We parked waay too close together to save money. We didn’t use dedicated passenger handling people to save money. And we didn’t really pay pilots very much to save money.
Real airlines aren’t yet in quite that fly-by-night cost squeeze. But give it another 20 years of cost cutting and Wal*Mart style pricing …
There is a corporate shuttle Dash-8 aircraft that operates between Toronto and Montreal that, when it arrives at the company gates, is basically inside a pocket of hangars. The noise is deafening, and there’s no real directionality to it; standing near that area is just a wall of noise, so the location of the engines isn’t really something you can determine by sound alone. The engines remain running… they unload one group of passengers, load up the next and head back out to Toronto, maybe twice a day.
I’ve seen this plane a few times, and watched as the passengers would exit it under the supervision of one pilot and another crew member would go to the back and begin to unload any luggage/mail stored in the baggage compartment. Often, a passenger or two would begin to take a step or two towards the back of the plane to collect their luggage. I’ve never witnessed any accident, though I do recall seeing the pilot herding the passengers be very adamant about sending them towards the gate…the luggage would be brought to them, not the other way around.
That’s pretty much a natural reaction I think. I’ve only been on a helicopter a couple of times but I remember ducking very low as I got out, even though I’m pretty sure the rotors were well above head height. I’d rather look slightly foolish than lose a few inches in height… 
My understanding was that the pilot in this case was hosting a party and was giving rides to multiple people, so I’m assuming that he was planning to take someone else up as soon as he was done with the injured woman in question. It makes some sense, then, that he wouldn’t have shut down the plane.
I took a sky-diving course with some friends about 15 years ago. The plane was a top-wing with the engines under the wing, and the door was aft of the engines. They had told us in the classroom to be aware of the propellers, but I don’t recall they stressed it very hard, or repeated the warning when it came time to approach the plane.
We approached from the front, and most of us made a wide arc to the door, steering well clear of the spinning prop. One of my friends (and we have this on video!) seemed distracted by something and was walking in a more-or-less straight line toward the plane’s door while looking off to the side. He suddenly realized he was within a few feet of the prop and stopped short, visibly startled, before continuing around the long way. And he is a private pilot!
We teased him about it, but it was kind of alarming how easy it would have been for any of us to walk into the propellor, and how few precautions were taken to make sure we didn’t.
According to this Dallas article the plane was a 2011 Aviat Husky. Google images show that as a single engine. She must have turned and walked in front of the plane to get hit.
Single-engine taildragger, and with a strutted wing to boot, so indeed she would have had to not just go around to “exit forward” but also cut in to the centerline somewhat sharply.
Just terrible :eek:
The article I read said that she was on her way to thank the pilot, so she may have exited on the right side of the plane and then tried to walk around the front to get to him.
As awful as her injuries sound, is it possible that hitting the propeller from the back instead of the front is what kept her from getting chopped to bits?
For what it is worth, I spent quite a few years getting on and off helicopters (mostly Super Pumas and S61s, also a few smaller 4-6 man helicopters in the gulf of mexico) going to and from oil rigs. We would regularly board and unboard when the rotors were running. It was drummed into us that you always exited and boarded straight out to the side, never to the front and never go to the back. Not going to the back is obvious , but the reason for not going out to the front was that for some reason the blades came closer to the ground at the front and wind gusts could cause the blades to dip even lower, possibly below 6ft.
So always out and back to the side.
It’s astonishingly subtle. The spinning prop doesn’t look like a “thing” at all, just a blur. It is a phenomenon outside your everyday experience. Looking at it, it almost “feels” like you could put your hand through it, or walk through it. Pilots are familiar enough to be scared of it, or at least extremely cautious of it (though pilots can make mistakes too, or become distracted).
People who are less familiar could be quite unaware of the danger, unless it’s very explicitly pointed out to them. Of course, you may say, the danger should be obvious to anyone who gives it a moment’s thought. But you can’t assume someone will give it a moment’s thought.
The noise and wind are not especially good warnings. If the engine is running, the whole area is filled with noise. If you’re standing forward of the prop, facing it, it won’t feel particularly windy.
No. there’s no advantage because it’s the same edge that hits you.
While working out in the Everglades, helicopter was my primary mode of transportation. In retrospect, it was an amazing experience and I still can’t believe I spent the majority of my three years down there in a helicopter! But it’s also amazing how fast it all becomes a mundane, everyday thing.
I was ever-diligent about being safe around the helicopter, which always ran whenever my assistant and I would get out and unload. We carried a lot of gear, and I was always anal about keeping the dip nets and PVC pipes horizontal instead of vertical. Hats were also an issue. I once lost mine when the main prop sucked it off my head. The hat was completely vaporized, but the helicopter was out of a service for a month. 
Anyway, once after a long day and an even longer week, I was loading up the helicopter when my assistant went to retrieve something floating away from him (we were in knee-deep water). Through fatigue, I watched passively as he ran towards the rear propeller. Then reality jolted me awake and I screamed. He stopped (thank goodness he could hear me above the roar of the helicopter) and did a perfect pivot back in my direction. It occurred to me then that fatigue and helicopters do NOT mix at all. After that, I always reminded myself to be more alert than usual at the end of the day.
IME, ‘alighting’ means ‘landing’. I’ve heard British people call the undercarriage ‘alighting gear’.
How fast does a typical propellor spin?
At idle, about 800 rpm.
That’s for a Cessna with a Lycoming O-360. I don’t know about other engines or aircraft.
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Depends. Rate of closure?
Fingers into a fan?
Fingers into a prop?
From the front?
From the back?
Me - done the fingers in the fan blades… Don’t ask…
Me, hand started .020 to .75 model airplane engines.
Me, – hand started tail-dragger or tricycle geared aircraft with everything from a VW engine to the C- 65, 4 cylinder engines all the way up to the I-O-540 lycoming, on the 260 Comanche, probably the most dangerous …
Round engines like the 5 cylinder 165 HP Kinner on a PT-22 ( very dangerous ) to the P&W 1340 ( 600 hp ) on the front of AT-6’s. ( pretty easy to do )
The red & white paint jobs on helio tail rotors will suck in many people and are very dangerous…
Always remember & never forget that aircraft engines will always start instantly and they have machetes for blades and to put a body part in the plane of it is always stupid… The aircraft always wins …
[QUOTE=Johnny L.A.]
At idle, about 800 rpm.
That’s for a Cessna with a Lycoming O-360. I don’t know about other engines or aircraft.
[/QUOTE]
A 172Q “Cutlass”?
Tip speed on its 76" prop at 800 RPM will be 180 miles per hour. Touching that will definitely spoil your day.
I don’t know the actual max RPM for that plane and engine, but the engine is rated for 180 HP at 2700 RPM. Prop tip speed at 2700 RPM is 610 MPH, or a bit over .8 Mach.