Accident to Police helicopter in Arkansas

[CharlieOneSix]

Watch from 1:05 onwards. So what does the team think? My two penn'orth is that there were a couple of slight twitches in yaw which triggered a slight forward roll of the unchocked platform towards the parked tractor. I then see an excessive aft cyclic input to arrest what the pilot perhaps saw as forward motion of the helicopter, followed by raising of the collective. What happened next is beyond me - why didn't he just establish a safe hover and think about things.

I've never liked operating from platforms such as this - margins are always a bit tight but an unchocked platform is asking for trouble.
.

Little Rock police on Tuesday released surveillance footage of a department helicopter crash that injured one person last week.

The crash happened Thursday at a police training center off Ironton Cut Off Road. Pilot and retired officer William "Bill" Denio was seriously injured, the department reported.

Surveillance footage posted on the Little Rock police Facebook page shows the observation helicopter, a 2001 Bell TH-67, parked on a flatbed trailer with its rotary blades spinning. The helicopter starts to alternately hover and descend above the platform, turning side to side as its landing skids hit the flatbed. A man can be seen pointing toward the ground, as if instructing the pilot to land, when one of the landing skids appears to get caught underneath the platform. The helicopter then rolls right and crashes into the ground, destroying the rotary blades and sending shards of twisted metal spinning through air.

The man who had been signaling to the chopper rushes toward the vehicle after the crash, the video shows.

Denio was hospitalized with a head injury.

Police said Denio was testing new equipment in the helicopter when a straight-line wind knocked it off the platform.

The department initially said the helicopter was not airborne, though the video shows otherwise.

[Cacophonix]

The whole platform seems to move forward and the pilot (one assumes he was a pilot and not a technician/engineer) overcooks the back cyclic, no doubt assuming he was airborne, and... hey I am saying exactly what C16 is saying. .. He had basically landed, albeit ungracefully, next to the platform and why he didn't simply drop the collective and pretend he had intended the whole manoeuvre and go inside and have a little cry, is beyond me unless this chap simply wasn't a qualified pilot. I hope he recovers fully.

These dynamic rollover accidents are always shocking to a tyro like me and how quickly they destroy what was a perfectly good aircraft in a matter of two seconds or so.

Caco

[CharlieOneSix]

.....and another odd one! Not a tail rotor drive failure as being an AS350 the fuselage is rotating the wrong way for that. Looks as though he has full right pedal and a light collective.

[G-CPTN]

A quarter century ago I 'learned' to fly a helicopter using FS FlightSim.
At first I was uncoordinated, so I had many failures to get off the ground and many 'tilt' crashes on the pad, but eventually I got the hang of how to coordinate the controls, and although it wasn't real flying I managed to be able to 'fly' without crashing.
Many years later, after ten years of no MSFS activity, I had the opportunity of a real-world helicopter flight.
After the instructor negotiated the departure from the airfield he invited me to take the controls, and I was able to control the aircraft unassisted - including maintaining the hover, and I flew the aircraft around the circuit over terrain with which I was familiar as it had been my fixed-wing MSFS circuit with fast jets (including the real-world military range and recovery route) which got me back to the airport approach where the instructor guided me to the runway where I hover-taxied to the 'clubhouse'.
After landing, I was completely mentally drained (due to the intense concentration demanded) and needed a quiet room to recover from the hour-long flight.

[Cacophonix]

.....and another odd one! Not a tail rotor drive failure as being an AS350 the fuselage is rotating the wrong way for that. Looks as though he has full right pedal and a light collective.

Front passenger inadvertently extended right pedal? Stuck pedal?

Certainly a bad day for the helicopter flown by Captain Hareram Thapa (what a great name)!

http://bit.ly/2lG9S3c

Article claims that the helicopter was landing but that doesn't add up!

Not the first time a Simrik Air Helicopter has come to grief it seems...

http://admin.myrepublica.com/feature-ar ... orkha.html

The pilot had to land the helicopter at Samdo village in Samagaun VDC after he faced difficulty tracking the destination. The pilot then landed the chopper at a narrow place between the mountains.

The chopper had caught fire when it was preparing for takeoff from the Samdo village, according to passengers on board the chopper. Had the pilot tracked the destination, he would not have force- landed, according to passengers.

It seems for a patient travelling in the Simrik Air ambulance that there is a likelihood that their first accident will soon be followed by a second one in the helicopter. I jest. I am sure these guys operate in mountainous conditions at altitudes that would test the best of pilots, never mind lesser mortals and jokers like me.

Caco

[Cacophonix]

Another, to my mind inexplicable, accident! The low RPM horn goes off, and he appears to do absolutely nothing about it, no collective drop, no concomitant aft cyclic, no check on the collective and no autorotation to a suitable landing site, just the blare of the horn all the way to a rather disturbing, and injurious accident, by the sounds of it. Looking at one of the images the rotor RPM decayed to between 60 and 70%. He must have had the vertical descent speed of a brick by that stage.



Caco

[CharlieOneSix]

Jeez - what was the guy thinking!? No attempt to go into autorotation, there were certainly two open areas he could have got to. He must have frozen with "it can't be happening to me" going though his brain.