EMS AS350 Crash Tucson

[VeeAny]

Sadly another EMS helicopter crash. RIP

Medical helicopter crash kills three in Tucson, Arizona WireUpdate Local | Local Breaking News | Local Breaking Wire - (http://wireupdate.com/local/medical-helicopter-crash-kills-three-in-tucson-arizona/)

[Soave_Pilot]

Jul 28, 2010 (The Arizona Daily Star - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
Three people were killed with a medical evacuation helicopter crashed on Tucson's north side Wednesday afternoon.
Killed in the crash were the pilot, flight nurse and paramedic, said Air Methods, the company that operated the LifeNet helicopter. There were no patients aboard the aircraft, the company said.
The helicopter crashed into a fence in front of a house on North Park Avenue just south of East Glenn Street and burst into flames.
Three people were on board the AS350 B3 Eurocopter, which was operated by Colorado-based air ambulance service LifeNet.
The helicopter's pilot was in contact with the control tower at Tucson International Airport at the time of the crash, but there was no indication of a problem, said Lynn Lunsford, an FAA spokesman.
The aircraft was traveling from Marana to Douglas at the time, but was not transporting a patient, Lunsford said. It crashed about 1:45 p.m.
Rotors stopped
Eyewitness Ricardo Carrasco said the helicopter's rotors stopped working and it started plummeting toward the ground.
He said the pilot managed to steer the chopper away from the house.
"If he (the pilot) hadn't turned around he'd have hit the house," said Carrasco, who ran toward the helicopter after it crashed but wasn't able to get close because of a "a wall of flames."
He and bystanders helped evacuate people in the neighborhood. There are no reports of injuries to residents or bystanders.
"One of the employees heard a loud boom, but he didn't know what it was and he went back to working on a car," said Tyler Edwards, 34, a service advisor at Stuttgart Autohaus, 614 E. Glenn St.
"Two people walked in who said they saw the craft go down. It appeared it had a malfunction and they saw it go down and then there was a lot of black smoke," said Edwards of the husband and wife who walked into the shop that repairs Volkswagens and Audis.
He said not long after the incident police squad cars, motorcycle officers, paramedics and fire engines began "flying down the street."
Officers began closing down the street at North First Avenue and East Glenn Street toward the east, Edwards said. Traffic began piling up in the area but motorists remained patient, he said.
House shook, flames intense
John Townsend, 74, who lives in the house where the helicopter crashed into the fence said he heard a loud noise shortly before 2 p.m. and then the house shook. He said he went into the back yard and saw smoke and flames.
Immediately after the crash Townsend said he didn't realize it was a helicopter. He said he grabbed a garden house to try to put out the flames, but the fire and smoke were too intense and he went back inside.
Townsend said a neighbor banged on his front door and told him to get out of the house.
The FAA is sending inspectors to the crash site. The agency will conduct the investigation along with the National Transportation Safety Board.

[fly911]

http://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/azstarnet.com/content/tncms/assets/editorial/3/36/c2e/336c2efa-9b42-11df-951b-001cc4c002e0-revisions/4c51cd895b787.image.jpg
Victims of medical helicopter crash

Photos courtesy Air Methods The victims of Wednesday's crash of a LifeNet helicopter in Tucson. From left, flight nurse Parker W. Summons, 41; paramedic Brenda E. French, 28; pilot Alexander (Alex) B. Kelley, 61.

_________________________________________________

I wonder how many deaths could be prevented with more crashworthy fuel cells. Having flown for LifeNet myself, I'd like to see more done in this area. Rest in peace, my friends.

[Lonewolf_50]

The joy of an eyewitness account.

I realize that Mister Carrasco was trying to be helpful in reporting what he saw, but ...
Eyewitness Ricardo Carrasco said the helicopter's rotors stopped working and it started plummeting toward the ground.


He said the pilot managed to steer the chopper away from the house.

"If he (the pilot) hadn't turned around he'd have hit the house," said Carrasco, who ran toward the helicopter after it crashed but wasn't able to get close because of a "a wall of flames."

You can't steer the helicopter if the rotors have stopped working. :cool:

The actual malfunction was .... ????
Did he mean that the engines quit? No idea. From the news report, bird in touch with tower, but apparently no time for a mayday (too busy handling whatever it was that went wrong ... aviate, navigate, communicate).

We shall see as the NTSB and others dig into the mishap.

RIP, to our three rotary wing borne friends, :{ and thanks for all the lives you did save by simply doing your jobs.

@ fly911: man, that picture speaks with a thousand words, all of them sad. :(

[SASless]

If an eye witness, even someone with very little knowledge of helicopters, sees the rotors stopped....that is pretty compelling news to suggest a catastrophic failure of some kind. The investigation will be able to determine if the gearbox was in the aircraft at time of impact.

Sad news.....as this one begins to look as an engineering or component failure. Crew error while in cruise flight in the middle of the day in good weather pretty much rules out crew error.

[Lonewolf_50]

fly911_ out of curiosity, what happened to the picture of the crashed helicopter that was up initially? :confused: Do appreciate putting faces and names of the lost crew, however.

SASless: the point in detail that I was trying to make was, based on the eyewitness statement, you can't turn / maneuver the helicopter if the blades aren't turning. I am unsure of what he saw, based on his description, as he attributed turning to avoid the house to the crew before the aircraft impacted the ground.

His statement may not be presented to the reader in the order he gave it. It is, after all, an excerpt on the news and probably only a fraction of his entire description.

So, what did he really see?

From the statement provided, it is unclear.

[IntheTin]

More pictures here......


Copter crash kills 3; witness snaps stunning photo - KGUN 9 On Your Side, Tucson News, Weather & Sports (http://www.kgun9.com/global/story.asp?s=12886046)

[Soave_Pilot]

He seems to be on a 70 degree nose down attitude with the collective under his arm... I'll be eager to see the report to find out what happened there.:confused: Maybe eng failure at a low altitude and trying to gain some airspeed? who knows...

[Lonewolf_50]

He seems to be on a 70 degree nose down attitude with the collective under his arm... I'll be eager to see the report to find out what happened there.http://images.ibsrv.net/ibsrv/res/src:www.pprune.org/get/images/smilies/confused.gif Maybe eng failure at a low altitude and trying to gain some airspeed? who knows...
Just out of curiosity, by "collective under his arm" do you mean down, or up? I am guessing "collective up" as what you meant.

My looking at the grainy photo I wasn't able to parse as well. Did you infer that (collective up?) by how you see the disk/coning in the pictures?

From what I recall of my training in a Jet Ranger, pushing nose down (all else unchanged) in an auto/power loss, tended to lower NR (transient), pulling up on the nose tended to increase it (transient) and the usual reaction to an engine failure is to lower collective to preserve NR ... so your post struck me as counter intuitive.

Can you explain your analysis to me? :confused:

[Soave_Pilot]

Just out of curiosity, by "collective under his arm" do you mean down, or up? I am guessing "collective up" as what you meant.

Yes,
I meant as the collective was raised that c%#$p out of it.:ok:... under his arm pit pretty much. At that point anyone of us would have done that.
But again... just speculation looking at the pic.

[fly911]

Lonewolf_50 fly911_ out of curiosity, what happened to the picture of the crashed helicopter that was up initially?
Just didn't feel right. I usually defer to my gut in these matters.

[Furia]

Rest in Peace! :sad:

My condolences to their families and their colleagues.

[rupigill]

May GOD rest their souls in peace.

Will we ever come to know what went wrong with the helicopter after the enquiry is over. Pilot appears to be highly experienced and other problem I can think of is Weather or Technical.

[TukTuk BoomBoom]

Ah wild speculation, jeeze i love it.

"He seems to be on a 70 degree nose down attitude with the collective under his arm... Maybe eng failure at a low altitude and trying to gain some airspeed? who knows... "

"...as this one begins to look as an engineering or component failure. Crew error while in cruise flight in the middle of the day in good weather pretty much rules out crew error."

All this analysis from a newspaper article and one photo! Crew error ruled out already!

Yet another EMS accident, too many good people lost already
RIP

[fly911]

This image may or may not suggest excessive coning. Low rotor RPM might account for lack of attitude control. We search for a cause not for mere speculation sake, but to avoide a reoccurrence and to learn from each others observation. If you feel the need to discount an observation, please feel free to do so.

http://i135.photobucket.com/albums/q140/fly911/Coning.jpg

[widgeon]

Again , hard to tell from the grainy photos . But on the first post crash photo , is there a single ( fairly complete ) main rotor blade visible ?.

[The Sultan]

That angle looks similar to the NY TV ship that ended up on the roof awhile back. Wasn't that one traced to a hydraulic failure (a belt I believe)?

The Sultan

[fly911]

Good point TS. That NY ship had the belt installed inside-out and it failed as a result. I hope that they can rule that in or out, what with the fire. I've flown the AS350B2 and BA with hydraulics off but this was a B3. The earlier models were flyable but more challenging than say the Bell 206B for example.

[Lonewolf_50]

Just didn't feel right. I usually defer to my gut in these matters.
Roger.

The more I think of it, the more I like your second choice, the friendly faces of the crew.

[fly911]

NTSB Preliminary Report

WPR10FA371 (http://ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?ev_id=20100728X92614&key=1)

[topendtorque]

Initial radar data indicated that the helicopter was on a steady southeast course, at 131 knots ground speed, and 900 feet above ground level (agl). The last 8 seconds of radar data indicated that the helicopter descended 600 feet. The last radar return was at 1341:32, approximately 140 feet agl, and 0.25 miles from the accident site. The pilot did not transmit a radio distress call.


don't know if this is calculated correctly, a bit fuzzy at the moment,

so 8 secs@ 131 kts is 584 yards? and 4500ftm = 200 yds or 1 in 3 down to the 140 feet agl. probably thought he had it there ( so no mayday) and slowing and then the bit in red is 1 yard down for every 10 forwards.

i have no idea of auto descent normal rate, but assume to acheive the 4500 he must have had the coll full down and the high 131 A/S, but the last 440 yds looks like a much reduced forward airspeed, on the average.

but the horrible picture seems to show a slower rate across ground, almost going into the dreaded J curve for the last sixty or seventy feet.

very sad.

[Gomer Pylot]

You cannot approach 4500'/min descent in a normal autorotation. That's falling, not flying. My calculations don't make it quite that high, but close enough.

[topendtorque]

You cannot approach 4500'/min descent in a normal autorotation. That's falling, not flying.


that is sad, at least there is a radar trace for wiw.

[WhirlwindIII]

Whump Whump sounds like rotor blade slap from maneuvering.

Rapid intermittent popping sounds seems like a series of compressor stalls.

The positive coning angle on the rotor in the picture seems to indicate the rotor was turning at that point.

Flight trajectory became increasingly vertical could be the final portion of descent after speed reduction, powered or not.

Impacted the ground in a level attitude appears to indicate the very final portion of the descent prior to impact had rotor control for a flare?

A 4500fpm rate of descent is not normal for autorotation in an A-Star (or any other helicopter I am familiar with) unless possibly the rotor is at an adverse value. After impact the main and tail rotor blades apparently have little torsional/twisting damage. Not sure what that indicates.

Decades ago I trained pilots in the AS-350D and had them pick it up and set it down hydraulics off, prior to doing a circuit with hydraulics failure on downwind so they would have an idea what they were dealing with when transitioning towards the hover. This actually shortened hydraulics off training, and increased pilot confidence if necessary to make a hydraulics off approach to a point at such other than an airstrip, etc. The B series hydraulic off flight I am not familiar with; I suspect it is more unpleasant than the D-model.

Condolences.

WIII

[ReverseFlight]

From my memory of a test flight in an AS350D, the RoD reached nearly 3000 fpm at 90 kts. I don't know whether that extrapolates to 4500 fpm at 131 kts.

The RoD on a textbook auto at 70 kts should be a lot lower at 1500 to 2000 fpm. We also performed a zero speed auto and the RoD was about 3000 fpm. With lots of height to recover, of course.

[WhirlwindIII]

I don't remember values that high but good information.

It doesn't appear the helicopter fell from the sky as one witness indicated, due to the impact attitude being flat - implies some pilot awareness and controllability post the low pitch attitude picture.

I remember on engine failure the AS350 rotor decays rapidly, like other low inertia rotors; lot like the H300C.

I can imagine a pilot getting startled by the hugely loud low rotor horn (that's what I remember from the D-model), being delayed in collective reduction, and getting behind the recovery curve.

He may have just had too much ROD to effect a recovery at the bottom.

Very sad stuff.

WIII

[henra]

What makes me doubt the low RRPM is that the blades in the picture appear absolutely straight, i.e. no tulip shape.
Normally the blades on the AS350 are not extremely rigid.
So I would expect a more curved shape of the blades if the RRPM was really very low. And to explain the attitude in the picture by LoC due to low RRPM would require VERY low RPM.

There might be some merit to the Hydraulics problem theory. Just speculating though, which I know I shouldn´t....

[Lonewolf_50]

Have any of you had a bird strike in an AS350?

Working through the brief report, I'll assume for the moment that the pop pop sounds were the symptoms of a compressor stall. From that thought, hypothesis of a bird flying into an engine, compressor stall, and then ... and another bird, at about the same time, hit the aircraft as well.

At 131 knots, if a bird hits the wind screen of the AS350, is it likely to bounce off or penetrate or crack the windshield?

The few pictures I saw didn't suggest to me a broken windscreen on the left side, but I didn't see the right side where pilot sits.

If you had both a compressor stall and a pilot hit by a bird (Yes, I am guessing here), the pilot at the controls might be having difficulty dealing with the engine problem due to impact injury ... up to partial incapacitation. Partial suggested due to generally remaining in flat attitude (as reported) up to impact.

I realize I've pulled this out of my backside, but I recall a case over 25 years ago of a pilot temporarily dazed by a turkey buzzard smashing through his windscreen and being knocked groggy. He then came to and managed to fly his aircraft home, even though he had (IIRC) a broken collar bone. He was up a few thousand feet, however.

I also have no idea what typical bird activity is in Tuscon at this time of year, so this may be a very dumb bit of speculation.

[WhirlwindIII]

Never thought of it. I know a BK117 that had both condition levers pushed to idle after a goose hit the upper middle windscreen. The pilot figured it out just prior to entering the trees and wound up saving the aircraft and possibly all on board. Stuff happens very fast and one has to get really determined to deal with it in a hurry or the outcome may not be good. The shock value must be very difficult to overcome.

I flew a AS350D for five years. Never had a strike but some years after it was sold the entire left front, including a portion of the Lexan windscreen, was broken and mangled by hitting a seagull. I'd say at 131 knots a large bird could get through to affect the pilot.

[JimEli]

Seems oddly reminiscent of this unsolved B3 accident:

DFW07GA119 (http://ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief2.asp?ev_id=20070530X00664&ntsbno=DFW07GA119&akey=1)

“The pilot's encounter with a vortex ring state and his inability to maintain control of the helicopter.” I hope we don't get a similar wildly speculative explanation pulled from the hat here too.

[Pilot13A]

A company pilot hit a duck in a AS350B2 couple of years back. He would have been in cruise about 1000agl. It smashed thru center of bubble and splattered all the occupants in blood, guts and feathers. They managed to land ok at the aerodrome nearby.

[fly911]

In the case of an incapacitated pilot, I can see one of the medical crewmembers pulling back on the cyclic in a last ditch effort to pull out of the fatal dive at the last second. This may have been responsible for the flare or leveling off before impact. If the crash investigation evidence shows an unrestrained med crewmember at time of impact, this may be the reason. Usually in cruise they would be strapped in.

[SASless]

Here are some photos of the Baptist EMS A-Star encounter with a flock of birds.....the windscreen sure got quacked!


Baptist Med Flight - a set on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflyphotography/sets/72157612944812758/)