I’m in the flight path of medical helicopters and what the person in the video described is what you would hear from a helicopter arcing around your location in a change of direction. You know when it’s low. There’s a distinct pressure wave you can feel as well as hear. What the person in the video is describing is consistent with a low flying helicopter turning and climbing close by. And close can be ¼ mile away.
Think of the maneuver from a pilot’s point of view when confronted with fog in mountainous terrain. The prudent thing to do is arrest your forward movement and convert that into lift to get above the terrain in front of you. We know the pilot was making a left turn with passengers. He’s not in an air race. He’s going to make the turn as gentle as possible to keep the G force down.
Worse yet is when you aren’t even conscious of what you’re doing.
This is why the occasional defensive driving course is a good idea. Everyone’s driving skills degrade over time as they tolerate just a tiny bit more inattention and nonchalance, day after day.
The helicopter didn’t have a terrain awareness system (TAWS).
It wasn’t mandatory but this was a luxury charter that seated more than six passengers. You’d expect the best equipment for VIP’s.
This fact makes me more puzzled about the mindset of the pilot.
According to information from the NTSB, the helicopter’s radar returns indicated that just before impact, it was in a “descending left bank”.
If you’re wrapped up in cloud and have no idea where the ground is (and know you will have no warning if you get too low to terrain), why would you be in a descending ANYTHING? Was the pilot stuck in a visual rule mindset and ignoring his instruments? Because I’m pretty sure the altimeter and rate-of-climb indicator would definitely have said “you’re descending” if the pilot had looked at them.
Maybe the pilot thought he could get below the deck and reestablish his navigation?
^
Very puzzling, will be interested if the facts are ever verified.
Yeah, in a plane you have to maintain air speed, but in a helicopter you can hover. And this pilot appeared to speed downwards when all common sense says that he should have hovered upwards.
The pilot was trying to fly visually in poor weather. The likely explanation is that he encountered worsening visibility, and was either attempting a fairly radical maneuver (perhaps a 180-degree turn in the canyon) to avoid cloud, or attempting to transition from flying visually to flying without external visibility on instruments. The latter should involve an immediate climb in a safe direction to a safe altitude for the highest terrain in the surrounding area. But if you lose external visual references and are not fully on top of the transition from scanning outside to scanning the instruments to monitor your attitude etc., you can become disoriented surprisingly quickly. When you can’t see outside, the cues from your vestibular system are highly unreliable, you can be in an accelerating turning descent and feel as though you are climbing straight ahead. He likely entered IMC (cloud, no outside reference) and lost awareness of his aircraft’s attitude and speed. If this is what happened, it’s called CFIT, controlled flight into terrain - nothing wrong with the aircraft, it was doing exactly what his control inputs told it to do.
It’s worth adding - the pilot was highly experienced, and certainly rated to fly IFR (on instruments, in cloud), and the aircraft was equipped to do so. But it’s less common for helicopters to fly IFR, and flying on instruments is something that you need to practice to maintain your skills. In principle, he had the skills and the equipment to “escape” from the worsening weather by transitioning to IFR. But it’s not implausible that even a highly experienced pilot might have just screwed up.
Based on the flight chatter, I’m about 97% sure this is what happened. There is no indication of any kind in the pilot’s words or tone than there was anything wrong with his aircraft. All indications are that he just flew it into the ground.
Is there something akin to an artificial horizon in a helicopter whereby it can tell you if you’re going up or forward-down?
I’m not sure “impress” would be it, so much as “don’t want to look bad.” He might not be in a race to get to the destination, but he doesn’t want to be like, “I gotta admit fault, things aren’t so well, I got to pause, hover, maybe even land us temporarily or re-route to a different place.” Mamba could easily fire him and hire another pilot then, even if this pilot would have been doing the frustrating but right thing.
Yes. And this heli, while perhaps not completely state-of-the-art, was a well-equipped fairly high-end machine. But it still requires skill and practice to fly using these instruments. For most operational purposes, helicopters pilots tend to fly visually most of the time.
So, based on the review we’ve done, it sounds like it is entirely possible that nobody on the flight, except the pilot, knew anything was ever amiss. And even the pilot may have just thought that he was disoriented, but could get out of it with a few maneuvers. Meaning, nobody thought they were going to die before they crash landed - they were just belted in, shooting the shit, maybe in mid sentence, when life ended in a violent collision. I guess that is marginally better than being terrified in the seconds before your life ends, but not by much.
Yep, that’s about it.
At most there might have been a half minute of “what the heck?” or fear, but yeah, that’s about right.
I can’t see Kobe (or anyone) firing the pilot. Pilot: “Sorry I got you to the basketball practice late, but the weather conditions were really hazardous and was only thinking about safety, especially with your daughter aboard.” If anything, Kobe would have given him a bonus for getting his daughter and everyone else to the destination safely under very dangerous conditions.
At first I thought he accidentally wandered off 101 onto Las Virgenes RD but he may have turned onto Las Virgenes Rd thinking it was Lost Hills Rd. He’s flown this route before and knows there’s a small community off of Lost Hills which represents relatively flat terrain. This would be a good spot to turn around and pick up 101 again. Visually he would have seen houses off to the right which reinforced a believe he was turning at the Lost Hills exit. But if he’s turning on Las Virgenes then the houses off to the right are up against hills on the left.
I still don’t understand how this happens with the instrumentation he had on board. The news talked about the helicopter not having a TAWS (Terrain Avoidance and Warning System) but he did have a GPS equivalent according to reports. He had software that allowed him to fly with terrain visual references and warnings as well as a map display with major roads.
It was certainly a glass cockpit (flat screens that replace individual gauges). He would have had large screen views of whatever he wanted to see.
He was Kobe’s preferred pilot, but he didn’t work for Kobe but rather for a charter company. Apparently he took over the gig in 2016 after Kobe’s previous favorite left the company. At least from that article he seems both experienced and not at all reckless. He also flew Kawhi Leonard around regularly as well, after Kobe sold Kawhi on the benefits of helicopter commuting.
A new bit of information - Apparently the charter company was not certified for IFR flight What that means, apparently, is that although the pilot was qualified and the helicopter had the equipment for it the company under whose auspices the flight took place was not allowed to fly passengers under IFR flight plans in IFR conditions. I’m guessing that also means the instrumentation was not maintained/certified for IFR flight (instruments used for IFR flight must be highly accurate and undergo testing and maintenance more often than those used for VFR flight).
Well, that starts to explain some things…
The part about asking for support for the other families who lost loved ones is classy. It’s easy for grief to make one selfish, or at least only to think about your own loss.
Regards,
Shodan
First Laker game since crash starting in LA now. Depressing. 