Given that they officially died of drowning, meaning they survived the crash, it couldn’t have hurt.
Could they have unhooked each other with a few more seconds???
As others have said, I think you are underestimating the “wild panic makes people forget how to do even the most basic things” factor. Many people just cannot think in an emergency; the brain often just does not lend itself to any kind of thinking or logic in that situation.
Imagine being dunked suddenly in a pool of water, disoriented. Quick, what’s 5 times 17?
The time to sue a corporation for a newsworthy violation is when people are still talking about it.
There was a time when flying out to oil rigs off shore you needed a passing grade from a training place where:
You are put into an helio on a boom and after some practice on what to do, you are fully dressed in your normal clothes and strapped in ; suspended over a big pool, the lights are killed so it is dark, the helio crashes into the water and is rolled inverted. Then you have to get out and to the surface. Really hard to do and you know what is coming. Without this certification, you don’t get to go out in a helio and you ride the crew boats. Then you must ride the Billy Pugh from the deck to the rig. Then you go get your certification so you never have to do that again.
Such units do not have to be turned on. Just stick the mouthpiece in your mouth, exhale first, then breathe. Keep breathing from the unit until the air runs out or you do. Takes about 5 seconds to train on its use. Really easy to use item.
I guess this is the place to say: I was very impressed with the operation in both of the exercises where I participated - not only did the emergency services test the ‘playbook’ scenario (where everything goes to plan and people line up in orderly fashion to be decontaminted), but they also ran scenarios with people panicking, and other scenarios where members of the response team deviated from protocol or fell sick themselves). I have a lot of confidence in our emergency services.
This tragedy is awful. Seeing the video of a softish landing (puly, that’s what your friend shot?) and a slow roll into the water, knowing they were trapped the way they were, makes it that much more visceral and terrifying. I can’t grasp what they went through as they died, dragged by the current underwater, and am appreciative for that.
It is stunning that, given the risk profile of a helicopter, that was the plan for civilians to get out of the copter. It’s something out of the movie An Officer and a Gentlemen’s navy jet pilot training scene. There is no way Joe/Jane Tourist should be expected to perform at that level.
Yeah?
Unbuckling your restraint harness is really easy to do, too, yet people frequently fail to perform that action during an actual emergency. Opening a door is really easy to do, yet people frequently fail to perform that action during an actual emergency. Those are actions people perform frequently, you’d think muscle memory would enable them to do them effectively, and yet every year a certain number of people die because they fail to do them. Attempting to perform actions you don’t do frequently during such an emergency is even more likely to end in failure.
Actual experience shows that people often do not perform even simple actions well in certain types of emergencies.
I heard on ABC news that it is the third helicopter crash in eleven years for this company. That’s a lot.
Not to derail the thread but why? Nothing’s going to happen immediately. All it does is make them look money-grubbing, at least to me. Bury your relative, take some time to mourn & make some thoughtful decision about hiring a lawyer instead of when you can’t make a rational decision because of the shock one is now in from the sudden loss of a relative.
I thought this thread was going to be about the pilot’s assertion:
The idea that there’s a “stop flying” button and that it can be accidentally activated and a passenger could do so flabbergasts me. What a monumental design failure.
This.
Here’s the bystander footage of the “crash,” which wasn’t really a crash: it was a nice, controlled autorotation with a gentle set-down into the water, and they were upright for several seconds after touchdown. However, the passengers were probably already soaking in adrenaline, and as soon as they touched down they were up to their knees in painfully cold ice water. For untrained civilians, these are circumstances pretty much guaranteed to suppress the sort of rational thought that would have been required to release a complicated harness they had probably never seen/used until that day. When you’re freezing cold, upside down in dark water, your reptilian brain is screaming “GET OUT, GET OUT, GET OUT”; it makes you scream and jerk at your harness with all your might, and refuses to allow your cognitive side a single goddam moment to think about why you can’t get out, and how to solve that problem.
A $30 investment in three emergency strap cutters could have saved everyone’s life in that helicopter.
https://bradleyssurplus.com/strap-cutter-gerber-tool-1.html?gdffi=842032db731040c68c754bca3e977ac9&gdfms=854EDA96DA99443A9808E636E4129303&gclid=Cj0KCQjwkKPVBRDtARIsAA2CG6Fp2AXg94CgwSXCdPfMB_831wlWKqY15pzA1au6NLr-5pqCHxs1yCwaAkmaEALw_wcB
I certainly hope these tools are put in every plane and helicopter. Immediately! Like, get off your lazy, stupid ass and go buy them, right now! Today!
It boogles the mind a tragedy had to happen before someone had enough sense to realize strap cutters are required equipment in every car, boat, plane abd helicopter.
I have a glass breaker/strap cutter tool in all my personal vehicles.
As I recall, some years back Six Flags over Texas had an incident where someone drowned when the raft in the River Rapids ride flipped. That’s waist-deep water, it’s Dallas so it wasn’t freezing water, and that ride doesn’t have a particularly complicated seat belt. Being dunked into freezing water in a crashing helicopter with an unfamiliar harness, I’m not surprised they couldn’t get out.
On the other I believe that the passengers had to leave everything behind except their cameras and and cell phones–so there were no passenger bags–see the previous post I cited about the three passengers who upgraded to this post from a passenger on another helicopter. Passenger bags just wouldn’t be safe in a doors open environment and consequent lots of wind.
If you want to read the reaction of professional aviation people including helicopter pilots look at:
No, no. In the article in the OP, a photographer named Vincent Laforet is quoted. That’s who I was referring to.
ETA: Wait, it doesn’t appear to be in that article anymore. So it must have been edited. (No, it hasn’t. See below).
ETA2: OK, maybe I’m going crazy. I must have my NYTimes links mixed up. This is the one I was thinking of. I must have had both open in the browser when I commented and lost track.
Haven’t read the thread, other than to search ‘doors’. The reporter seems aghast that people would be allowed on a helicopter without doos! OMG! :eek: I almost never flew with doors on. For one thing, the helicopters I rented are small. For another, it gets hot in L.A. And of course, the view is better.
Well, except for when there’s, for example, a fuel-fed fire in which case you WANT a “stop fuel” button. And, I must point out, that even if the engine quits flying machines do not typically plummet helplessly to do - there are techniques like “gliding” and “autorotation” that can lead to a safe, gentle return to the ground. It’s not a “stop flying” button, it’s a “stop fuel” button and there is a difference.
Of course, lack of an engine is serious business in a flying machine, but it’s NOT certain death. There are numerous accounts of pilots safely landing after loss of engine power, sufficient to show that the usual outcome these days is a survivable landing, not certain death. Indeed, even in this accident the helicopter landed on the water gently, it was subsequent events that lead to fatalities.
Ha-ha-ha - good luck getting those through the TSA. Look, even if they were available there’s still no guarantee that panicked people would be able to locate them and use them without dropping them or otherwise failing to function well, which is sort of the essence of panic - you’re not functioning well.
How often do you practice the motions to use it? Because history has shown that emergency equipment often isn’t helpful unless the owner has practiced with it on a regular basis.
I used to fly a Max-Air Drifter - and we often took off the front cowling, so it was basically a flying telephone pole. You don’t really need doors, walls, etc. for low-speed flying.
Everything else said, securing any items on board and making sure nothing can interfere with the controls is an important responsibility of the pilot. (Also, with open doors/cockpit/passenger areas making sure stuff can’t fall out and potentially cause injury and damage on the ground)
On commercial passenger flights, even assuming you could get those hammers installed on (or carried onto) the planes, they’d be pretty useless:
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car windows are 3/16" tempered glass, which shatters nicely when hit with a heavy, pointed object. Airplane windows are 1/2" polycarbonate, which is known particularly for NOT shattering during impact events; it’s the same material that’s used in safety glasses and motorcycle helmet visors. You can hit it all day long with your little safety hammer, and you’ll just leave little pock marks in it.
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the cognition and dexterity required to retrieve and use a never-used-before seat belt cutter greatly exceeds that required to release the buckle, which was specifically designed to be standard across the entire industry and gets used by a passenger every time they get up out of their seat. When you’re in panic mode, you go with what you know: flip the lever, get up, and get out.