Gyrocopter Accident today

[Fake Sealion]

A gyrocopter has crashed near Old Sarum airfield earlier today.

One fatality reported.

[Nibbler]

A sad day indeed for all concerned.

Those who work on a small licensed airfield can hardly be thought of as experienced fire rescue first aid providers - thankfully GA flying does not provide too many incidents to learn from. Yet, even though this is a secondary and unpaid role, every day these people face the possibility, sometimes the reality of having to deal with very demanding and stressful situations.

:D Congratulations then to the whole team who work at Old Sarum for a job well done. I hope you all will be able to quickly move on from the memories of this incident and none of you allow any negative thoughts to linger.

I know you won't get it but you deserve a pay rise!

[GgW]

Fatal gyrocopter crash (From Salisbury Journal) (http://www.salisburyjournal.co.uk/news/8999011.Fatal_gyrocopter_crash/)

[vanHorck]

I have never flown a gyrocopter, but they are a prominent part of GA (James Bond springs to mind).

A few years ago there were a lot of doubts about safety and at least some were grounded if memory serves me right, but improved designs and I guess training have brought them back on the scene.

Then a Gyrocopter was involved in a fatal accident on the ground when that copter was (allegedly?) used in anti-hunting activities. Not sure how the pilot's trial ended but it made BIG headlines.

I saw a picture of a recently developed fully enclosed cockpit Gyro and it looked very good. Believe it as of Italian build?

So the cause of this sad accident will be of interest to many. If ever Gyrocopters are to take off in a big way they need to be of safe construction and limit easily-made fatal pilot induced mistakes.

Perhaps someone with knowledge of Gyrocopters these days is willing to shed some light on the general safety state of the gyrocopter market?

[IO540]

Doesn't the rotor have a habit of coming off?

[The Nr Fairy]

Rotary chap here, not gyrocopter, but if rotors had a habit of coming off gyrocopters, they'd be banned by now.

The design of the gyrocopter means a) you need to keep positive G (same as in any underslung rotor design), you need to keep airspeed - to keep the rotors turning, and large power changes (especially reductions) or bunting means a probable loss of the rotor system if not done right. This is all to do with the physics of the rotor system and the alignement of the thrust line with the pitch axis.

There's no info on the type involved, but I note Old Sarum has an organisation offering trial / experience / training flights in a Magni which have a good reputation, as far as I can tell.

But this is 2 days after the accident. One person has died and the AAIB are involved - it might have been an off the cuff comment expecting a proper response, IO540, but you could have put it perhaps slightly more sensitively.

['India-Mike]

The only one I know of that crashed after the entire rotor assembly separated in flight is this one

http://www.aaib.gov.uk/cms_resources.cfm?file=/dft_avsafety_pdf_501029.pdf

That one appears however to have been a maintenance, rather than design, issue.

[FleetFlyer]

Its funny how there is always someone to pick up a poster for saying something insensitive when somebody has died. Nine times out of ten, the 'insensitive comment' is nothing of the sort. Also, this being a forum specifically aimed at enabling pilots to debate, its ridiculous to suggest that we all refrain from debating safety matters arising from a recent accident until the AAIB report is published (normally long after the accident has been forgotten by the GA community at large).

There have been a disproportionate number of accidents suffered by the autogyro fraternity. These are due to several factors to do with the stability and recoverability from unusual attitudes. As previously mentioned they are intolerant of negative G. This has induced the rotor to sever the tail on more than one occasion. There is also a design problem to overcome with the thrustline vs the center of mass. I forget the precise details but it was covered by a recent article in pilot magazine, during a review of one of the new Magni autogyros.

Essentially, the new machines are much safer than older designs, and will probably prove themselves to be as safe as other forms of GA. However, there are older machines still flying that are less safe. The RAF2000 (Rotary Air Force or something like that) autogyro currerntly has a permit restriction in place to limit airspeed to around 70mph as an accident investigation revealed it to be increasingly unstable above this speed.

[bookworm]

Gyroplanes do have a high fatal accident rate in the UK. CAP800 reports a fatal accident rate of about 400 per million flight hours (compared to 10 per million flight hours non-public transport fixed wing). Since the estimated total annual gyrocopter flying in the UK is of the order of only 2500 hours, it takes only one fatal accident per year to keep the accident rate at that level.

(Of course, that's not a comment on the airworthiness of gyroplanes. There are many different ways to have an accident.)

[A and C]

It would be interesting to know if last years accident when the hunt supporter lost his life is included in the numbers from the CAA, with such a small number of hours flown including an accident of a such unusual nature would give an unreprisentative bias to the numbers.

[bookworm]

No, they counted 9 fatal accidents between 2000 and 2009, but that one was excluded because the fatality was a third party on the ground. With estimated 22,500 hours flown between 2000 and 2009, that's almost exactly 400 per million hours.

Here are the corresponding accident rates per million flight hours [number of accidents in brackets to give an indication of the shot noise] from CAP800 (http://www.caa.co.uk/application.aspx?catid=33&pagetype=65&appid=11&mode=detail&id=4410)

0.0 Large Jet Public Transport [0]
1.1 Large TP Public Transport [2]
7.1 Business Jet Public Transport [1]
1.5 Small Public Transport [1]
1.1 All Heli Public Transport [3]
2.0 Offshore Heli Public Transport [3]

10.6 Small conventional non-Public-Transport [85]
15.9 Small heli non-PublicTransport [25]
23.2 Glider [32]
17.9 Microlight [20]
400 Gyroplane [9]

[aviate1138]

VanH said......

"I saw a picture of a recently developed fully enclosed cockpit Gyro and it looked very good. Believe it as of Italian build?"

This one is German origin I think.

The Calidus (http://www.rotorsport.org/page10.html)

I notice Wing Commander Ken Wallis has been designing, building and flying his series of autogyros and is in his 90's now. And he has had to push the envelope so they can't be that unsafe - if handled correctly.

[FleetFlyer]

Actually, the Cierva autogyros were among the most dangerous. It took some very hairy flying before the guy realised that the rotor needed to be articulated. Several Cierva autogyros lost their rotors back in the thirties. These are possibly the failures that IO540 was thinking of in his earlier post.

I suspect that the Cierva autogyros were marketed as safe because they could not be stalled or spun but in practice they suffered from the same negative G intolerance as modern AGs and their rotor mechanisms were very much pioneering new technology, with progress being made but lives being lost with each failure.

As regards the Wallis aircraft, I believe he may have had one accident that is up for all to see on youtube. The man is a gifted engineer and almost single handedly progressed the autogyro configuration and resloved many of its problems through the second half of the 20th century. His almost zero accident rate is due to his intimate product knowledge and his very specific and advanced handling skills. I also seem to remember him being reluctant to have others fly many of his machines because of the very specific skills required. He knew that they bite if not respected and he knows that not all pilots bear this limitation in mind all the time.

[patowalker]

Several Cierva autogyros lost their rotors back in the thirties. These are possibly the failures that IO540 was thinking of in his earlier post.

Yes, those accidents would have had a great impact on a teenager interested in aviation.