Some shots of the recovered helicopter. Given the violence of the initial contact with the water I had expected more damage but I guess the force of the water and the almost instant deceleration would have been more than enough to incapacitate the pilot and passengers. Egress from the helicopter may have been difficult in the dark. I guess the North Sea veterans here would have more value to add to the question about how difficult that might be?
A good friend asked about the altimeter. I guess a correctly set altimeter, if he had looked at it, would have given him a good reference height, but I must admit that I am not sure of the instrument lighting in the R44, and in the stressful, dark conditions, he may have been fixated on looking out and was not scanning.. The sun had set and he would have been looking out at a flat calm surface over water with all the depth perception problems that can bring. The helicopter speed seems to imply he had not yet come to the hover with implication that he believed he was a lot higher than he was. He was only about 250 metres from his usual landing spot on the shoreline on the Vaal Marina where his holiday house was.
- ES2.JPG (37.45 KiB) Viewed 404 times
I think that residual fatigue may have also played a part in this accident given that in the previous two to three days he had flown over 2400 kilometers, including crossing demanding mountain passes at altitudes up to 10,000 feet. The pilot was not a young man and doing all that in an R44 would be extremely tiring. I know that the flight from Rand airport near Germiston to the Vaal dam is only about 127 kilometers, and it was a journey that he had made many times before, but the cumulative flight time, plus the late departure and the flight into the growing dark might finally have caught up with this chap.