But what I wonder is, if you are a helicopter pilot, why not make absolutely certain you are higher than any surrounding terrain? Presumably the pilot has checked the route and knows what the tallest things in the way will be.
Even if you are sliding sideways or whatever at least there is nothing to hit if you are above it.
I get that altitude alone does not get you out of trouble but it would seem there is at least one less thing to worry about if trouble finds you.
Because in this case, the pilot was trying to stay below the clouds, which given the ceiling height on that day, necessitated being lower than the terrain. Once he flew into IMC, he tried to climb out but he got disoriented and spiraled in before he could do so.
That is the essence of flying IFR (Instrument Flight Rules). You take off and climb out on a track that gives you some confidence you won’t hit anything, then once at a safe height you fly to your destination where you fly an approach that also keeps you away from hard stuff until you can see the runway. It’s a great system and you can do almost all of it without needing to see anything. It is also relatively expensive, it costs more to keep aircraft certified for IFR, it costs money for the pilots to train for IFR, and it costs money to keep pilots current. If a company has no need for IFR, it won’t bother with it.
If that is a viable plan B, then I’d be questioning why it wasn’t plan A. If the answer is that pilot and machine weren’t certified, then I’d say it’s not a viable plan B.
I’ve only just read the Wikipedia description of the crash, but it seems as though he probably tried to do that. A climbing left turn followed by a steeply descending left turn suggests a climb into the clouds followed by disorientation and loss of control. As hovering is harder than flying at speed in a helicopter, I doubt that hovering and trying to climb through the cloud would have improved the outcome.
It seems to me you don’t need it until you do. I am no expert but I have read that many, many crashes are caused by pilots unexpectedly getting into IFR conditions with no training and/or equipment to handle it.
Many crashes do happen when pilots unexpectedly fly into IMC. But in this case, IMC was not unexpected. It appears in this case the pilot was deliberately scud running.
A sightseeing company has no need of IFR ops; can’t see much from inside clouds.
It’s the marginal situations that come up more often than management wants to write off that day’s (or morning’s) revenue. Most days it’s simply not an issue; the weather is plenty good. Some days are no-hopers, and even the greediest management accepts defeat. The stuff that’s in the middle is thankfully rare, and most times there’s some combo of flight cancels, reluctant customers, and excess risk taking that works out OK. More by luck than skill.
And sometimes you roll snake eyes.
The Grand Canyon outfit I flew for lost an airplane, pilot/manager, and 6 passengers a couple years before I worked there. Attempted VFR flight into IMC into the side of a mountain. Dumb, but he (apparently) figured he could skim a ridge and get into VMC without ATC being the wiser. He wasn’t where the thought he was and hit a high spot in the ridge, not the low saddle he was aiming for.
There is a LOT of unprofessionalism in the lower ranks of commercial aviation.
Because it’s not a legal plan B. Pilots do stupid things trying not to break the rules. The problem as I see it is he wasn’t flying ahead of the helicopter. The time to think things through in an emergency is to think ahead of where you’re at and have a plan B. Absent that my plan B would have been to climb above the terrain and call a center for support… I’d rather explain to the FAA that I got caught in IFR than lose control of the situation.
I’ll give an example. I was on a return trip with a buddy and we decided we wanted to eat someplace nice. We chose an airport and I plugged it into the GPS. GPS gave me 30 mins of reserve fuel. Not my comfort zone but it was a nice day. My plan B was as follows: I climbed to 12,500 feet for some wiggle room and ran the secondary tank dry. This put all the remaining fuel in the primary tank needed for landing. When I got to the airport I did an engine-to-idle approach so if I ran out of fuel I was already set up for an engine failure. After landing I sticked the tank out of curiosity and did in fact have 30 minutes of fuel left.
I was flying ahead of the situation the whole time.
As was explained, he was flying VFR and had to be free of the clouds. He would have had to file IFR en-route which is not a big deal unless you’re disoriented and need to fix the situation immediately. Just glancing down at the radio is enough time to lose control of a rapidly deterioration situation. I use to fly a plane that was just slightly out of rig. Take your hands off the yoke and it would start a slow bank to the left. Add a 3 lb GPS to the yoke and it is now a lever which accelerates the event. So, hands on the yoke at all times and the Artificial Horizon is your best friend in the world at night without a moon.
Good for you. That last sentence is certainly the right answer.
And your part before that is the underlying problem.
A pilot who works for a non-IFR company who gets into IMC has committed a violation. Asking ATC for help is reporting his violation to the FAA. Which may well end his current employment as well as his future prospects to have any better job farther up the aviation ladder. It may well end his entire aviation career.
At the moment of truth it’s real easy to persuade yourself you can skim that saddle, climb to VMC, or whatever. And very often it will work. The time to have decided not to do that was back before you got hired for this job, then again before you got to work this morning, then again before you lifted off on this flight.
The stats clearly show that very few pilots die the first time they cheat. And that companies that have accidents rarely have them on their first cheat either. Sadly, each time a cheat works, it lowers the “barrier to entry” to the next cheat. Until the inevitable accident finds the time and place to happen.
In my part of aviation we accept zero cheating. Because that slope is sooo slippery. And the law of large number would catch up with us very quickly at our scale.
Are they still doing the self-reporting thing through NASA, where if you confess your violation before the FAA starts looking at you, you don’t get charged?
I don’t want to get like a broken record by mentioning it all the time, but the latest write-up by Admiral Cloudberg is a great example of exactly this:
ASRS provides a way to avoid prosecution for an honest mistake. It provides zero defense for prosecution for a deliberate decision to ignore procedures or regulations.
Clearly the line between the two extremes can be fuzzy.
At big carriers we have a committee of FAA, Company, and Union experts who meet to process all these reports including the ones triggered by FAA’s, ATC’s, or our airplanes’ snitching monitoring systems. At a small outfit like a sightseeing company, it’s all FAA discretion. Here’s hoping the inspector had a good breakfast and didn’t argue with their spouse that morning.
Continued flight into IMC in a VMC-only operation is 99.9% deliberate violation, not mistake. The only way to win that game is not to play.
IMO (that no one asked for) I would think any time there is a financial incentive to fly (it’s their job) the pilots should be trained in IFR ops and their aircraft should have appropriate equipment for it (at least if they carry passengers (so maybe a crop dusting pilot would not need such training)).
In the Kobe Bryant accident the pilot had a very strong incentive to not say “no” to his client. Those types of clients do not like to hear a “no” and will find people who will never say that to them. Not to mention pressure to complete the flight no matter what.
If it makes flying a bit more expensive so be it. I would guess the kinds of people renting helicopters can afford the extra cost.
For fixed-wing charter operations that aren’t exclusively sightseeing, what you advocate isn’t that big of a deal. For point A to point B commercial tasks, I would imagine nearly all of the pilots, aircraft, and companies are certified for that kind of flying.
Fixed-wing IFR operations are significantly different than helicopter IFR operations, mainly because of landing. (And the instrumentation not really being able to handle helicopter low-speed flight without external visual references.) Fixed-wing IFR, you land at an airport. It has a very complicated set of machinery to enable aircraft to navigate through space to a given location, in a specific manner. Airports are wide open, and their landing slopes are wide open and unobstructed (or the obstructions are noted in the landing procedures.)
Helicopters, for the use you fly a helicopter for—take off and land nearly anywhere—don’t have that unless they’re flying to another airport. The school that Bryant was flying to, may have had a helipad, but it didn’t have an Instrument Landing Sysyem (I’m trying to get better with my acronym usage), and it didn’t have instrument landing procedures.
So, the pilot may have been able to go straight and climb a thousand feet and get out of the muck. Let’s assume he could, as illegal as that would have been. How’s he getting down? Descending into cloud to a known location, yeah, but using what to ensure he doesn’t hit anything on the way down through the clouds? A sectional chart and GPS? It’s tough, which is why, I’m guessing, a lot of helicopter commercial operations don’t bother with IFR conditions.
After climbing out of the soup he should have had sufficient fuel to get to an airport that’s not fogged in. Barring that the state of GPS technology provides a very cost effective database of terrain and obstacles. If he had that in the cockpit and could keep the rotors level he had everything needed to navigate back to his point of origin.
If I thought the weather was iffy I would have fished around for a right seat who could run the radio stack. Chances are the other helicopters with the same company weren’t being used if the cloud deck was low.
Illegal in the case of that particular guy’s situation to enter IFR at all, so having a co-pilot hop in beforehand to share IFR workload wasn’t happening.
With that marine layer, and with the crazy quilt of controlled airspace mixed with big terrain that characterizes Southern California general aviation, he might be in for a pretty big detour, if he did get on top… "Hey Boss. Y’all mind driving in from Ojai? Hopefully he had enough gas to get there.
Anyway, how do operators like .mil and oil-gas rig commuter pilots do it, I wonder? Or heck, LifeFlight operations sound really tough in that regard. Does the rig helipad have an ILS? Do they operate like fixed wing IFR landings? I.e., descend to X altitude and Y distance from threshold, and either see the runway or conduct missed approach procedure?
A large percentage of helicopter crashes I hear about involve air ambulances. The pilots are motivated to fly the missions. (And yes, the operators are motivated for the pilots to fly the missions, presumably for monetary reasons.)
Lifesaving missions remind me of this [emphasis mine]:
A letter to the editor of the old Coast Guard Magazine, written by CBM Clarence P. Brady, USCG (Ret.), published in the March 1954 issue (page 2), stated that the first person to make this remark was Keeper Patrick Etheridge. Brady knew him when both were stationed at the Cape Hatteras LSS. Brady tells the story as follows:
“A ship was stranded off Cape Hatteras on the Diamond Shoals and one of the life saving crew reported the fact that this ship had run ashore on the dangerous shoals. The old skipper gave the command to man the lifeboat and one of the men shouted out that we might make it out to the wreck but we would never make it back. The old skipper looked around and said, ‘The Blue Book says we’ve got to go out and it doesn’t say a damn thing about having to come back.’”
If the device first selected fails after such trial as satisfies him that no further attempt with it is feasible, he will resort to one of the others, and if that fails, then to the remaining one, and he will not desist from his efforts until by actual trial the impossibility of effecting a rescue is demonstrated. The statement of the keeper that he did not try to use the boat because the sea or surf was too heavy will not be accepted unless attempts to launch it were actually made and failed [emphasis added]…
He was legal to depart under special VFR. Having a copilot in the plane to share the workload makes a big difference. I’ve had my GPS shut down in less than optimal conditions and used a passenger as an auto pilot until I sorted things out. Not that I’m suggesting that in this example but having someone run the radio/navigation panel takes a huge load off the PIC.
