Virtue signaling exists. The term is often misapplied. It does not mean that someone is saying something just to look good. It literally means signaling virtue. It is a scientific term, and has neither a positive nor negative connotation. (The same is true of “cultural appropriation”). Unfortunately, the negative use has taken over in some circles.
What companies are accused of is being disingenuous with their virtue signaling. This does happen. The problem is when this is assumed of all virtue signalling, as is often used by the right against the left, and then in retaliation by the left against the right.
The people bringing up the accusation of rape against Bryant are virtue signalling. It is unclear to me that they are being disingenuous about it. I suspect they do in fact care, and are responding to the guy being lionized.
I personally think “Well, he does have that rape accusation which was never really resolved, so let’s not get too carried away in saying he’s a great guy” is an appropriate response to said lionization, but there’s no reason for it to go further than that. I definitely agree that debating what exactly happened belongs elsewhere.
Aside from that, I actually heard about this from live news earlier, but they were very cagey about saying whether the victims had actually died. They just confirmed who was in the crash, but not the status of the victims. My first instinct was to check here, and I got the straight dope. (I just didn’t have time or a clear head to reply earlier.)
I am saddened by the news. Regardless of what you think of the man, that he was with his daughter who he was training in basketball made it extra sad to me. I feel very, very bad for the family right now.
I mean, how do you end up that far west, scud-running? They were nowhere near their destination, nor on a path to get them there.
Just boggling. I mean I’ve read of incompetence from pilots flying celebrities: Aaliyah’s PIC deciding to fly when the plane was grossly overloaded, the Lafayette, LA twin crash after VMC roll, killing among others the sports sideline reporter who was the daughter-in-law of the LSU O.Coordinator. But it’s still anger inducing even if it’s not unexpected anymore.
SVFR in those conditions (widespread fog), without the ability to transition to IFR, is malpractice. It’s a 13 million dollar helicopter. I’m pretty sure it had a six pack of instruments, if not a glass cockpit with synthetic vision, a gazillion radios and navaids, plenty of charts, terrain maps, and GPS, and you decide to fuck around with following a fucking road at 130 knots plus at only a few hundred feet AGL? How fucking dare you!
S/he’s lucky they didn’t put the thing into a house when s/he tried to turn around, as poorly as s/he was flying. The more data I see about this crash, the angrier I get.
LA police & the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department weren’t flying because of fog. So why was Kobe’s pilot flying? It sure sounds like pilot error cost 9 people their lives. SNAFU
I thought this thread was about Kobe, not the alphabet. It’s OK for you to spell those terms out if you think they might need to be. I think some might need to be.
I was thinking the same exact thing. By the time I woke up (night shift) the story was pretty much out there. I had no idea such bad info was put out at first.
I’m with you. It’s not like it’s not pounded into your head how dangerous trying to push flying VFR in IFR conditions.
The police need to see what’s on the ground. It doesn’t make much sense for them to fly when they can’t. It’s not dangerous to fly a fully instrument rated aircraft in bad weather if you are flying on instruments and not your eyeballs. It is incredibly dangerous to fly in low visibility without using your instruments. Some pilots are simply reluctant to transition to their instruments and it sometimes costs lives.
CFIT - Controlled Flight Into Terrain. Meaning the aircraft was mechanically sound but for some reason the pilot flew into the side of a planet.
GA - General Aviation. Meaning not the military and not airlines. There are some technical definitions I won’t bore you with unless you really want them, but suffice to say that a privately chartered aircraft operates under slightly different rules and regs than, say United Airlines or Southwest
IMC - Instrument Meteorological Conditions. Meaning visibility outside the cockpit sucks and you need to rely on instruments to fly safely.
IFR - Instrument Flight Rules. Meaning the rules under which you fly while relying on instruments. Failure to comply can have lethal results.
VFR - Visual Flight Rules. Meaning when you look outside the cockpit there is sufficient visibility to safely navigate by relying on human vision.
SVFR - Special Visual Flight Rules. These are rules that are in effect when visibility is marginal, this is a link to a brief bit on SVFR in the US and the larger article discusses it a bit more.
Scud-running is EXACTLY how you wind up doing that. If they had an IFR current pilot and were flying IFR they would not have been off course. It was exactly because they were flying SVFR and had to maintain some visibility that probably pushed them off course. It’s a classic thing seen in this type of accident, that the need to stay out of zero-visibility conditions pushes the pilot further and further off course.
I thought that had as much to do with the load being improperly balanced as with being overweight - overweight airplanes have been known to complete flights successfully, out-of-balance airplanes not so much. Yes, that crash was on the pilot.
I’m not sure which crash this is that you are referring to. The only Lafayette, LA twin airplane crash I could find involved a declared emergency and attempted landing which means that it might not be due to a problem pilot. To start a turning descent that soon after takeoff usually indicates an engine problem or something equally serious. The fact that the pilot did not attempt to contact ATC means little - pilots are trained to fly first and communicate second. Dealing with the emergency at hand is supposed to take priority over using the radio.
But hey, go ahead and blame the pilot based on… nothing really.
Actually, it’s legal even if arguably stupid. There are reasons for allowing it. I would argue that ferrying a celebrity from point A to point B through poor conditions is not one of them, but there it is.
That particular helicopter was built in 1991 before glass cockpits, “synthetic vision”, and GPS were common things even if Sikorsky S-76’s more recently produced typically come with such things. Quite likely it was retro-fitted with more up to date avionics when owned by the State of Illinois before being sold off when the state downsized its collection of aircraft. It might also have a cockpit voice recorder as that is equipment installed on at least some S-76’s.
That said, following roads is, in fact, a legitimate navigation method under VFR flight, including SVFR. Which gets back to whether or not the flight should have been attempted in such conditions.
I don’t know that they were actually going 130 knots through the soup - while the helicopter is certainly capable of that speed as a helicopter, unlike a fixed wing, it is not required to maintain a minimum speed.
Flight at “several hundred feet AGL” is sort of required when flying in 2 mile visibility with an 800 foot ceiling while VFR - by definition you have to stay clear of clouds and that would mean an altitude lower than 800. Which, again gets back to whether or not they should have been attempting this flight in these conditions. I’m inclined to say “no”, but then I’ve been forced down by bad weather and am damn lucky to have come out of the experience unscathed and the experience made me more paranoid than average about getting into such a situation again, leading me to stay on the ground when plenty of other pilots decided to fly.
Yeah, it’s lucky all the pilot did was get 9 people killed and start a small brushfire. It could have been worse.
That said - I await the word of professional investigators to find out what really happened. Even so - my understanding is that even for helicopters SVFR is supposed to be in the airspace contacting the surface within the airspace of a towered airport. I’m not sure that flight plan, even as intended, would have conformed to those rules. It’s easy in hindsight to say the pilot, if for whatever reason he couldn’t move to an IFR flight plan, should have just found a spot and landed the copter instead of pressing on (and landing due to deteriorating weather is legal and well within a pilot’s options, as I know from direct experience), doubly tragic because it is MUCH easier to land an helicopter off-airport than a fixed wing, yet that did not happen here.
I’ve heard that IFR ratings are less common among rotorcraft pilots than fixed wing pilots. Maybe this pilot didn’t have an IFR rating?
The local municipal copters weren’t flying that day because of weather conditions, which against begs the question why did the pilot make this flight?
I just don’t understand why anyone would attempt VFR in 2 mile visibility and 800 foot ceiling. When I got caught by weather I had taken off into quite adequate conditions, it was when those conditions deteriorated that I ran into trouble. Taking off in such conditions would never occur to me.
The ONLY way I could see a justification for SVFR on such a flight is if something went wrong with the IFR instruments en route, necessitating going back to eyeballs. Even so, the response in those circumstances should, arguably, be to land the aircraft as soon as you can do so without trying to get to an airport. Again, a helicopter like that could land almost anywhere there is sufficient clearance for the rotors and terrain flat enough it won’t slide off a cliff - an open field, a parking lot, a road… Declare an emergency, land the beast, and when the FAA asks you to explain yourself say “machine malfunction ruled out IFR, did not feel it was safe to continue VFR in these conditions”. Yet it sounds like they might have launched SVFR in those conditions.
So, in a nutshell… the initial bit says surface conditions were considered IFR but they were “good” enough to allow SVFR. They were explicitly following roads for navigation (which is consistent with VFR flight). They were in communication with ATC but remained VFR the entire time. Then they dropped so low that radio communications with ATC were impaired. Then they crashed.
I’m still wondering WTF the pilot was thinking trying to make a point-to-point trip SVFR in that weather.
Not to be over-dramatic, but I could not stop thinking of myself with my own daughter(she’s 11) in a helicopter/plane knowing it was going down. Her grabbing me and me trying to protect her as I prayed desperately for “this” to not happen is pure nightmare fuel for me.
I hope they smashed into the ground unaware and didn’t have even a moment beyond a second to be shocked, worried, scared, etc.
It isn’t me I would be worried about, it’s my poor kid holding onto me wanting me to fix or stop it.
Ugh, I’m sick to my stomach even thinking about it.
Reading it, it looks a whole lot like he lost an engine shortly after takeoff—despite witnesses saying it sounded like both engines were at max rpm—let his airspeed decay, and ended up:
. Damn right I’m blaming the pilot on those sets of facts. That may change as more facts become available.
Moving along, on the Bryant crash, ADS-B had his helicopter at over 140 kts ground speed, 8 seconds from end of data. See, Kobe Bryant among those killed in helicopter crash | Flightradar24 Blog for the full data set. AIUI, they were running late for a game his kid was going to be in, which might explain the flight in marginal weather, and the high ground speed.
Looking at the flight data superimposed on Google Earth, it almost looks like the pilot saw fog up ahead, decided to 180 out of it, but was disoriented as to his exact location, and terrain didn’t allow him to complete the turn. As opposed to transitioning to IFR, opening a flight plan/re-contacting ATC (they originally asked for flight following), and climbing straight and level until the pilot reoriented himself. Zipping along 101 was clearly a much better idea than that… I like your idea of finding a clearing in extremis as well, though that can be extremely hazardous.
I had thought SVFR was best thought of as a very temporary crutch to get an aircraft briefly through less-than-VFR conditions until VFR conditions could be established? The example I’d seen is flying in clear air, with a lower ceiling than minimums—a marine layer of light stratus, say—but you can see clear air ahead, and just need to fly SVFR for a few minutes until you can resume normal VFR. It’s not to hang out in because you can’t fly IFR.
Yes, “pilot looses engine and fails to manage the situation properly” is certainly a strong possibility there. I can think of at least one alternative, though, so I’m going to reserve judgement on that, although like just about everyone else I might speculate.
Get-there-itis, in other words.
It does kill people, and not just celebrities.
I’m sure being parked in a holding pattern for 15 minutes at one point just added to urge to get where they were going.
Yes. My own “precautionary landing” was not a fun experience, despite being in a small aircraft arguably better than a lot of them for such a thing (Cessna 150) even if not a bush plane, and prior experience landing off-airport not just on grass strips but on actual fields. On the other hand, my attempting to continue in the air would have been even more hazardous.
By the time you get into a situation like that you no longer have good options, just different degrees of bad.
Exactly. The way it was explained to me it was for on-airport operations like repositioning an aircraft, or landing an aircraft that for whatever reason couldn’t go elsewhere, or, as you note, a BRIEF transition. Indeed, on the linked ATC communications more than one controller asks them to report when they’re in VFR conditions - I think that was assumption, that the SVFR would be a brief transition and not a cross-country flight as SVFR which makes no sense whatsoever unless, say, you’re trying to outrun an exploding volcano or Godzilla. Neither of which apply in this case.
Yes, that’s what it looks like.
Did Kobe pressure the pilot to fly? Or did the pilot say it was safe and convince his passengers this would work? I’ve seen both of those scenarios end in tears.
Except that’s the kind of weather where EVERY pilot starts refusing to do it. Except maybe that one guy who can be talked into anything, or is full of hubris. Pilots DO have the authority to say no, but yeah, some people are more comfortable risking their lives than their jobs.
Maybe the pilot wasn’t IFR rated?
Civilian-trained commercial helicopter pilots don’t always have that IFR rating, unlike fixed-wing commercial pilots where it seems nearly universal. If the pilot didn’t have an IFR rating then attempting to fly IFR likely would have been just as fatal but a whole lot sooner.
Maybe the avionics weren’t up to IFR flight? I don’t know what that helicopter was equipped with - it could have been an analog six-pack that maybe was no longer certified IFR compliant recently enough, or had a wonky pitot-static or vacuum system. Granted, that’s all sort of long-shot but it’s possible.
Just horrible news. My condolences to his wife and daughters.
By pure coincidence, I picked up a book at the library on Thursday called Bound for Glory. It was copyright in 2003, about sports players the author though would be future superstars, and Kobe Bryant was one of them (alone with Michael Vick).
This is what gets to me. I have a tween daughter and the thought of anyone’s daughter dying in a violent crash brings me to tears. And three died in that crash.
Kobe Bryant was just another basketball star to me. He came to terms with the woman he victimized; if she was willing to accept them then I’m not going to begrudge him. And he seemed to be becoming a force for good in the community–following the path of Magic Johnson.
The destination is wrong on that map. They were headed to Thousand Oaks, about ten miles further west. I don’t know exactly what landing zone was intended.
Looking at that flight path, I probably noticed them fly over me. I was at my kids’ tennis lessons and typically watch aircraft around the Hollywood airport. They went right past it at the right time.
