Originally Posted by
malabo
Question you brought up through: is it really ok to bent Uncle Sam's hardware and just grab another off the shelf? In my slim-margin dog-eat-dog commercial world, any mishap can break a company.
Obviously it's not "okay" to trash a helicopter. But what do we do, shoot them? Send them to Viet Nam? The fallout for the operator will remain to be seen. That's really none of our concern here. (But let's hope that Arista had hull insurance on the thing.)
We can assume that these guys were not inexperienced drivers. None of these firefighting companies are transitioning their 206 pilots into the right seat of the UH-60. We do not know what caused them to press on so far into deteriorating conditions. It may be something as simple as, "Yeaaaah, we probably should've turned around sooner, but we thought we were okay. And then suddenly it all turned to sh*t and...well, you know..." At that point it did not matter whether it was an S-92 or an R-22. Anyone who says it's never happened to them hasn't been flying very long...or maybe has forgotten what it's like when your aircraft has to be at a certain place at a certain time, when you're low on fuel as soon as you take off, and YOU are the guy who's supposed to be getting it there. And then the weather turns crappy...
REALLY crappy, and you're sitting there, nervous as a whore in church, thinking, "Ya know, this really isn't turning out so well," and wondering why you ever became a helicopter pilot in the first place?
It's easy to sit in our armchairs and say that they should have turned around sooner, or should have landed, or should not even have gotten out of bed that morning. But we weren't there. It's a horrible situation, yeah. But nobody got badly hurt or killed, and the only thing damaged on the ground were some trees...and a replaceable helicopter. Learn from it and move on.