Wait, that’s you on top of that balloon 25 years ago? Or someone named Al?
Maybe it was @Spiderman, but they wanted everyone to call them Al.
What Everyone Got WRONG About the LA Helicopter Crash
The video is cued to about 6:18, where the Taking Off host starts talking about information that was incorrect. It looked to me as if the helicopter was in a hover and, depending on the altitude, may have been within the ‘dead man’s curve’. The host shows data that the aircraft had an airspeed of 39 knots, and was inside of the safe flight envelope.
So when you’re long-lining you’ve got to be on the wrong side of the curve a couple hours a day? Yikes. This is a fun helo channel if you haven’t seen it…
It sure helps to have a twin-engined helo that can maintain hover at that altitude and load with one engine out.
Twins can still suffer a catastrophic transmission failure that leaves the rotor unpowered. But statistics say those are a lot more rare than simple engine failures. Especially in turbines. Which all modern twins are.
I don’t think either of his ships (Bell 407 and A-star B3) are twins, but certainly turbine. I do a lot of heli-skiing in a Bell 205 (Huey) and am probably behind the curve more than I like to think about, although there is a LOT of rotational mass in a 205.
No, that was Al, I just wanted to recreate what he did.
I believe that was Paul
Okay, here’s an unusual one: one killed after two gliders mid-air
Cool. Sorry it didn’t work out this time.
Earlier in the video he talks about drones. He has no good answer as to why they aren’t used in place of helicopters.
There were 4 helicopters covering a news story that was arguably better served by newer/safer/cheaper technology.
Organizational inertia. Inadequate range. Inadequate endurance. Inadequate speed. Inadequate payload. Unusablility near airports.
And that’s with 30 seconds’ thought. I could probably come up with 50 more reasons given an hour.
Big one: the requirement that the operator have the drone in sight at all times. The helicopter can quickly get to events that a drone operator would take forever to drive to. It is LA after all.
Moderating:
I think what you are saying here is that you’ve created an AI generated image, and I’m not actually certain from what you posted whether it represents a real event or not.
Please tell people unambiguously when you are posting AI images. And if it’s an image of something real, speaking as a poster, I’d like to be able to tell.
Thanks
Dollar per dollar, news drones exceed helicopters in all those categories. They’re basically stationary machines that can be scattered all around a city and deployed with an almost zero energy cost and rotated indefinitely with another drone.
In another installment of “The most interesting plane I saw today”, this B-17 keeps flying over my house (not that I’m complaining).
You think wrong! Capital A & lowercase L as in Al, short for Allen, & yes, he really did a top walk at the festival 10 days after 9/11. Here is a story about it as proof
Sorry, my mod note was erroneous. And that’s a cool story and a cool photo.
Maybe posts about guys named Albert, Alfred, Allen, etc, need to refer to them as AL, henceforth.
A converted Cessna 208 Grand Caravan equipped with autonomy technology completed what its owner, Joby Aviation, said was the first fully autonomous, coast-to-coast journey across the U.S.
Joby, which has spent most of its existence developing a piloted eVTOL air taxi but in recent years began exploring autonomy, said Friday that the Caravan covered almost 3,200 miles on the journey from California to North Carolina, which began earlier in September. The company said the aircraft’s onboard human safety pilot made zero control inputs during the multi-leg mission, marking a new capability milestone for its proprietary technology.
It was a 4-leg trip. At each of the three stops it participated in “demonstrations” for potential customers.
I was wondering by the headline, as without bladder tanks a Caravan’s max range is something like 1,000nm.
The article didn’t say, so I assume it autonomously flew the arrivals and approaches as dictated by ATC. I wonder how that worked.