I’m not a basketball fan, so while it’s a very sad for his family, I’m having trouble getting worked up about it. But judging by what I was hearing on talk radio while running errands, LA is gutted.
Sounds like it was controlled flight into terrain in IFR conditions. It’s been a cloudy/foggy day. That area has a lot of steep hillsides that can come up at you quickly if visibility is bad. Apparently he’d been using choppers for commuting for years, and it finally caught up with him.
[Update a while later]
Here‘s the latest from PJMedia.
Guy in Home Depot told me he’d heard that all of his daughters were aboard, but fortunately, only one was. He left a wife and four others.
Someone took video of the helicopter going down. Weather was not a factor. It was autorotating as it fell several hundred feet at least.
Autorotating? Really?
It’s a twin; losing both engines seems really unlikely, unless they forgot to fuel it. Maybe a main transmission failure? The sprag clutches on the rotor side of the transmission as mitigation for that exact failure mode.
CFIT seems unlikely too, considering that the S-76 is basically the King Air of civilian rotary-wing, i.e., a corporate flagship aircraft, and would almost certainly have a TAWS installed.
Just another reminder that rotary-wing has about an order of magnitude more failure modes that end in death or serious injury than fixed-wing. Fun to work on from an engineering standpoint (I have several years of rotary-wing flight control design experience) but I have no interest in flying in one unless I have no choice…
And my deepest condolences to the families and friends of the crash victims. Very sad.
Avweb is reporting the pilots were flying Special VFR. They had requested flight following but were denied because they were below radar coverage. The weather was reported at ceiling 1100 feet and visibility 2.5 miles, but who knows what the conditions were at the crash site. CFIT hasn’t been ruled out as of yet but it could’ve been any number of other things.
So they were flying at 160 at impact, 20 miles from destination. The pilot wouldn’t normally (normal conditions) begin descent that far out right? So scud running? It sure looks like he was flying way below surrounding terrain. At 160.
There was an 1100 ft ceiling, impact was at 1200 ft. Blind CFIT.
The video going round is obviously fake – wrong type, and how would you have video in IFR conditions? The flight tracking shows him hitting the mountain with a horizontal speed of 160 knots, very little vertical speed.
This was CFIT (controlled flight into terrain). The pilot was bouncing around in altitude right before they hit, so possibly the altimeter failed? But they were flying special VFR, which is kind of a red flag.
Ok, it is possible the video I saw, which was supposedly Bryant’s chopper, was in fact a different crash.
Flight tracking sites have the ADS-B info on the flight. Very little info, but it does look like CFIT. 132 knots on last transmission.
I think some of the very last telemetry are artifacts of the crash event and not precursors. Descriptions by witnesses before and after don’t suggest a preceding catastrophic failure beyond bad judgment in IFR conditions. They should have sat down at Van Nuys and caught a cab.
According to the flight log they were joyriding over downtown l.A. then attempting to joyride over Hidden Hills. On a foggy day? WTF.
There were a bunch of kids in that aircraft. I guess the pilot was willing to show them how fun a helicopter ride could be.