I’ll have to remember to read it later. Does it say why only one of the pair was arrested?
A helicopter crashed in Sacramento.
There’s video of the helicopter in flight, and then the camera moves away (probably the car driver ducking) and the the helicopter is wrecked on the ground. It looked like the helicopter was in norml autorotation, although I did think I saw a shake. I can’t see why the helicopter would crash in the half-second the camera was off of it. Maybe the pilot pulled too much collective and stalled the rotor ten feet off the ground?
The pilot, a nurse, and an EMT were aboard, and are in ‘critical condition’.
ETA:
‘It just plummeted out of the sky, and it hit hard… obviously, because it was falling…’ said a witness. Sounds like the pilot landed too high.
Shoulda stopped at one toke? (Sorry)
One toke over the line. 
That eyewitness vid was too quick for me to make anything useful about the pre-crash period. But just as a matter of timing the helo had to have a LOT of VVI to cover the altitude between what we last saw before the camera veered off and then it striking the ground.
Reuters is reporting that the A320 family has now overtaken the 737 in total deliveries:
There’s another video circulating where you see the helicopter came down to the right of the roadway, touching down on a steep embankment. It then rolled onto its side, ending up where you saw it.
Thanks for that. I didn’t see a flare.
@Pork_Rind’s news station link didn’t want to play for me; probably didn’t like my ad blocking. Here’s the raw dashcam footage on youtube. And for once, without any overprinting obscuring what we want to see, nor with excessive trimming for brevity. Whoever prepped this one for posting gets a gold star from me.
As @Johnny_L.A says, there was no flare.
I don’t know enough about autorotations to say whether the flare should have been started at an altitude above the road greater than where they hit. My point being that since the slope was in darkness and hard to see, the pilot may have believed the dark area was horizontal at road level, not at the 45 degree incline it really was. Such that maybe he was about to flare for where he thought the ground was and was surprised when it arrived early. Or maybe he was way late anyhow.
I’m a bit surprised at the high VVI. Autos are sporty maneuvers for sure, but overall that seemed more like a plummet with directional control than an auto. Again I’m no expert on helos, but have watched some number of them from the outside IRL plus on vids.
As always, because of the video frame rate strobe effect we can say nothing useful about rotor RPM from how the blades appear to be turning.
This surely means the A320 has been more successful than the 737 for a long time as the 737 had a full 20 years head start on the Airbus.
I’ve been out of the saddle for a long time (
), but IIRC autorotations in an R22 or 300CB were about 1,200 fpm.
In the R22 and 300CB, flares were initiated at about 40 AGL (and drop collective to maintain rotor RPM). At about 8 AGL, level the skids and pull collective to cushion the landing. (Done right, it’s as smooth as a normal landing.) I can only imagine that hitting the ground slower, even on a slope, would be better than hitting it at a high sink rate.
On approach, you have a ‘sight picture’. (I’ve always thought that sounds redundant.) Basically, you aim for an isosceles trapezoid that doesn’t move, but only gets bigger as you approach. When I watched the video, I thought, ‘Why is he aiming for the slope?’ You may be right that he didn’t realise it was a slope. Personally, I would have aimed for the well-lit concrete or the asphalt shoulder. If that was what he was aiming for, his trapezoid would have been moving away from him.
There’s also the fact that the airline industry was simply much smaller in the 1960s-80s.
'Zactly. The annual sales numbers for the 737 have kind of an exponential look to them. Lots of early years with small sales, then it hits a knee in the curve and takes off. Both as the industry grew and as the sorta-competing 727 shut down.
The A320 series has a flatter (but still ever-increasing) sales curve starting from a higher base in a larger industry.
Still and all, I don’t mean to take anything away from the A320’s accomplishment as the best selling airliner ever. And now they’re going from strength to strength as first the NEOs and now 321XLRs are starting to roll off the line in quantity. if only Pratt hadn’t had so much trouble with the GTF, Airbus would be in an even stronger position.
I wonder if he thought he had a flat area in sight that was not in the middle of several lanes of fast moving traffic. And that the area turned out not to be as flat as thought. Dropping into moving traffic with the standard lack of awareness of your average driver would leave me wondering about alternatives.
Yes, that’s what @LSLGuy opined.
I assume the pilot was familiar with the area, so I don’t know.
That was an Eurocopter EC130 - Wikipedia or one of the similar predecessor models. Bigger and heavier with higher disc loading than your cited trainers. Suggesting the flare should be started even higher than 40 feet to arrest the greater VVI.
Even had the pilot believed the dark area was level with the well-lit roadway, that suggests he was below the desired flare point when the ground arrived. He either misjudged it or had insufficient rotor RPM to work with.
We don’t know how high he was, or how fast, when the problem started. But he may have been still near or inside the no-hope zone of the HV diagram and was doing what little could be done to salvage the unsalvageable.
Helicopter height–velocity diagram - Wikipedia for those not familiar.
ETA: ninja’ed on this point.
Aiming for the dark (presumably flat & clear) area might make sense given the traffic density. Making a forced landing into a freeway full of rush hour cars means making a forced landing on cars, not on roadway. The pilot was also under extreme time pressure.
I agree that I’d expect the pilot to be real familiar with the roads, topography, etc., that close to their base. Which suggests hitting the slope was either a bonehead or hasty mistake, or running out of altitude, airspeed, rotor RPM, and ideas pretty much all at the same time. A shitty spot to be in.
I hope the folks aboard can be patched up to a reasonable semblance of their pre-crash health.
‘Dead Man’s Curve’. I’ve googled the area. According to the first article I read right after the crash, the crash site was ‘just east of Stockton Blvd on Hwy 50’. On this map, you can see how close the highway is to UC Davis Medical Center. The pilot should have been within the envelope, but he (or she) was climbing and not in cruise. The pilot may have performed a takeoff that was out of the envelope to avoid annoying people living in the houses below. I’ve seen helicopters approaching a hospital in the crowded downtown area of Seattle (lots of tall buildings). They’re basically performing a pinnacle landing, which is steeper than normal. When I’ve taken off from a pinnacle/ridge, it was great fun to let the helicopter go over the edge and suddenly lose ground effect. I imagine doing that off the top of a building in a city could possibly be frowned upon.
The EC130 has a gross weight of about 5,500 pounds. The H-V chart on the Wikipedia page indicates the curve is for 8,500 pounds and below, so it should apply here. So if the pilot was trying to gain altitude quickly and was slow, then it looks like he would be outside of the envelope.
Looking at your map cite it must’ve happened real fast. They lifted off, started translating forward, and maybe climbing a bit and accelerating, traveled just a couple of residential blocks, then the shit hit the fan rotor.
The HV diagram in my wiki cite is for an entirely different helo, but one of the same general size & tech. So probably decently representative of this helo too.
The medevac biz has a bad accident rate. Not because they’re goofs but because they do a lot of ops in bad = unforgiving situations. Such as departing from semi-tall buildings in suburbia.
FWIW, here’s an H-V diagram for an AS350, from which the EC130 was derived.
Even one crash is too many, but things do seem to be getting better: https://www.airmedicaljournal.com/article/S1067-991X(24)00164-0/fulltext
And… yikes: