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Jan. 27th, 2020 09:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynI heard about the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash.
I don't follow sports if I can avoid it, but this is a news story I'm paying attention to because it involved a helicopter, and I can all but guarantee that coworkers and family members of mine will be asking if I heard about it and what I think about it. Can't blame them; for a lot of them I'm the only aviation-adjacent person they know, and the world of rotorcraft is even smaller than the world of fixed-wing aviation. (My best friend from elementary and high school has a brother-in-law with a fixed-wing private pilot certificate, which is the Big Official Language way of saying he has an airplane pilot's license.) So I'm basically the person who is expected to know about these things, for them.
That being said, I'm currently doing my best to find info about the actual aviation facts involved, which is a little tricky given that about 60-70% of any given article this morning is about Mr. Bryant and his daughter, or the other people on board. I know it was a Sikorsky, and I know it was a foggy day with a low cloud ceiling. I know that the local sheriff's department had grounded their helicopters for safety purposes and so had the LAPD. I know there's talk of mechanical error being possibly involved, but that we don't have more info than that yet, and that the crash site is tricky to reach at best.
I don't know what was going on with the pilot or Mr. Bryant or anyone else involved in the decision-making process yesterday. I assume the pilot had an instrument rating (Big Official Language translation: I assume the pilot had training to fly based solely on the sensors and instruments rather than what could be seen out the window, and that this was reflected in the pilot's licensing). From what I understand, most if not all commercial pilots do, and I am assuming that the pilot had a commercial certificate and worked for Mr. Bryant rather than being a friend of Mr. Bryant who agreed to transport his buddy and their guests. That's... probably indicative of mechanical failure, unless something was lurking inside the cloud cover and fog and the Sikorsky hit it. (There are signs all over Lawrence Municipal exhorting pilots to report any and all wildlife strikes to the NTSB/FAA/other federal agencies that deal in birdy things. I realize drones are an increasing possibility these days, but on a crap visibility day I sort of assume that the drone pilots are staying home and any collision danger comes from birds.)
There is, of course, the possibility that something went horribly wrong with the pilot. If you've ever seen a movie or TV show that showed someone flying a helicopter, you've... well, honestly, you've probably seen it depicted wrong, because TV and movies almost never show helicopter stuff accurately. Regardless, you might have noticed that the pilots tend to have their hands on the central stick a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Airplane pilots, from single-engine pilots up through the flight crews on a jumbo jet, have more freedom to take their hands off the controls. The vast majority of airplanes, by design, are more inherently stable than helicopters, and pilots can let go of the stick or the yoke or whatever if they're in straight-and-level flight and not suffer for it. Helicopters are not like that. Even on the bigger ones with more inertia, you have to keep your hand on the controls- at least on the cyclic, anyway, which is the one that tips you left/right or forward/backwards (as opposed to the collective, which sends you straight up/straight down, or the pedals, which turn your nose left or right by means of adjusting what the tail rotor does). A helicopter pilot who has something go wrong with their arms, or who has a cardiac event or a blood sugar incident or something similar, has a problem much much faster than an airplane pilot in a similarly sized and similarly performing craft. The Sikorsky S-76 has a crew of two, but I don't know if there was a second pilot on board Mr. Bryant's helicopter. If there was only one person at the controls and something happened to them-
I just checked. It appears there was only one pilot. And it appears that people reported the engine was making sputtering noises. So... yeah, sounds like mechanical issues, so far. But we'll see.
I have a flight lesson tomorrow. We'll be practicing the procedures to take in the event of a total engine failure. I need to be able to handle those anyway, because it's part of the practical exam, but I expect that's the kind of thing that will be on more than a few pilots' minds after what happened.
I don't follow sports if I can avoid it, but this is a news story I'm paying attention to because it involved a helicopter, and I can all but guarantee that coworkers and family members of mine will be asking if I heard about it and what I think about it. Can't blame them; for a lot of them I'm the only aviation-adjacent person they know, and the world of rotorcraft is even smaller than the world of fixed-wing aviation. (My best friend from elementary and high school has a brother-in-law with a fixed-wing private pilot certificate, which is the Big Official Language way of saying he has an airplane pilot's license.) So I'm basically the person who is expected to know about these things, for them.
That being said, I'm currently doing my best to find info about the actual aviation facts involved, which is a little tricky given that about 60-70% of any given article this morning is about Mr. Bryant and his daughter, or the other people on board. I know it was a Sikorsky, and I know it was a foggy day with a low cloud ceiling. I know that the local sheriff's department had grounded their helicopters for safety purposes and so had the LAPD. I know there's talk of mechanical error being possibly involved, but that we don't have more info than that yet, and that the crash site is tricky to reach at best.
I don't know what was going on with the pilot or Mr. Bryant or anyone else involved in the decision-making process yesterday. I assume the pilot had an instrument rating (Big Official Language translation: I assume the pilot had training to fly based solely on the sensors and instruments rather than what could be seen out the window, and that this was reflected in the pilot's licensing). From what I understand, most if not all commercial pilots do, and I am assuming that the pilot had a commercial certificate and worked for Mr. Bryant rather than being a friend of Mr. Bryant who agreed to transport his buddy and their guests. That's... probably indicative of mechanical failure, unless something was lurking inside the cloud cover and fog and the Sikorsky hit it. (There are signs all over Lawrence Municipal exhorting pilots to report any and all wildlife strikes to the NTSB/FAA/other federal agencies that deal in birdy things. I realize drones are an increasing possibility these days, but on a crap visibility day I sort of assume that the drone pilots are staying home and any collision danger comes from birds.)
There is, of course, the possibility that something went horribly wrong with the pilot. If you've ever seen a movie or TV show that showed someone flying a helicopter, you've... well, honestly, you've probably seen it depicted wrong, because TV and movies almost never show helicopter stuff accurately. Regardless, you might have noticed that the pilots tend to have their hands on the central stick a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Airplane pilots, from single-engine pilots up through the flight crews on a jumbo jet, have more freedom to take their hands off the controls. The vast majority of airplanes, by design, are more inherently stable than helicopters, and pilots can let go of the stick or the yoke or whatever if they're in straight-and-level flight and not suffer for it. Helicopters are not like that. Even on the bigger ones with more inertia, you have to keep your hand on the controls- at least on the cyclic, anyway, which is the one that tips you left/right or forward/backwards (as opposed to the collective, which sends you straight up/straight down, or the pedals, which turn your nose left or right by means of adjusting what the tail rotor does). A helicopter pilot who has something go wrong with their arms, or who has a cardiac event or a blood sugar incident or something similar, has a problem much much faster than an airplane pilot in a similarly sized and similarly performing craft. The Sikorsky S-76 has a crew of two, but I don't know if there was a second pilot on board Mr. Bryant's helicopter. If there was only one person at the controls and something happened to them-
I just checked. It appears there was only one pilot. And it appears that people reported the engine was making sputtering noises. So... yeah, sounds like mechanical issues, so far. But we'll see.
I have a flight lesson tomorrow. We'll be practicing the procedures to take in the event of a total engine failure. I need to be able to handle those anyway, because it's part of the practical exam, but I expect that's the kind of thing that will be on more than a few pilots' minds after what happened.
