Originally Posted by
Indelible Spirit
“The helicopter did not have a terrain awareness and warning system -- a safety feature which provides the pilot with information about the terrain,” Homendy [of the NTSB] said. (CNN article 1/29/2020)
Not required.
Originally Posted by
jimtun
Apparently the Heli was flying at 130kts just below cloud before the eventful left turn , and a lot of comment suggests 130kts is a bit fast in those met. conditions .
Im thinking the Pilot felt he was running out of time to get his VIP to destination ontime , and may have been going faster than desirable , and took a chance on getting through on the 101 highway route , because of the earlier substantial holding delay south of Burbank , and subsequent routing north of Van Nuys .
Could pilot have questioned Burbank ATC a bit more about his holding delay , or the unexpected routing north of Van Nuys , rather than just accept it ? , and then maybe bought himself some time for options later ?
Heli could also have continued West on 118 towards Camarillo in maybe marginal VFR ,or climbing above the layer and then IR approach to Camarillo , or had he already decided after passing over Van Nuys to then aim for a set down somewhere near Mamba destination Thousand Lakes to give the pax an on-time arrival ?
We may never know , but hope to learn !
The 118 is at a higher elevation and most likely the Cloud base would have been lower.
Originally Posted by
kenish
The maximum elevation of Hwy 101 is approximately 800 MSL in the area of the crash and farther west at Conejo summit. The general terrain is rolling to moderate hills and the valley floor is at least 1/4 mile wide in most spots. There are a few narrow points along the route but no place is a "gorge" with big vertical road cuts as someone else claimed. The narrowest points in the valley are a mile to the west around Liberty Canyon, and at Conejo Summit. See post #311 for a good topo.
On the other hand Hwy 118 climbs to 1700 MSL through the Santa Susana Pass, and points on the route are much narrower and "V" shaped. Surrounding terrain along the route is steep, rugged, and rapidly rising in spots.
Possibly it was "tribal knowledge" that 101 was a better route than 118 in MVFR (seems like 118 was solid IFR anyway), and the pilot was more familiar with the 101 route.
The Conejo grade is very much a gorge. It then drops steeply into the Camarillo plain. There are major electrical power lines on concrete pylons that cross the Conejo grade about 200-300 feet above the gorge.
Originally Posted by
TachyonID
For what it's worth, I'm based at SBA and had a trip into LA, by car, that morning driving through only about 40 minutes before the incident. As such I drove past KCMA, through Camarillo and up the hill to T/O and past Las Virgenes on the way into the Valley on the trip to Glendale.
The weather is being described by the media as "very bad" but it's not necessarily atypical for mornings coming from the Oxnard-Camarillo plain, where marine layer is common in summer but not that unusual year around. Oxnard was still foggy at 0845 that morning... and there'd been a bad crash, in similar conditions, on the Oxnard side of the river on the previous morning.
As is common, the fog cleared on the Camarillo side and KCMA was reporting "1.5 miles, with low ceiling" at that time of day.
What WAS unusual about the trip this time is that generally, when you have foggy conditions along the SBA-Ventura coast and the low-lying river mouth of the Ventura River area was this: USUALLY you drive OUT of the fog going up the hill. Generally it clears by the CHP Weigh Station at the top of Conejo Pass. This Sunday, however, it was different... coming over the top of the pass and down toward Wendy drive into Conejo Valley I got into pea soup fog, off-and-on, which didn't really clear until I was pretty much into the Valley at Topanga.
The net is that I simply don't see how this flight could have completed in VFR or SVFR operating rules, since there WERE MULTIPLE cloud/fog layers under a low overcast. He would have had to do more than Scud-running to get to a safe arrival at KCMA. I understand that he "did this trip all the time", but fog around the pass isn't that unusual-- it was just complicated Sunday by layers that he''d have had to transit for a safe arrival. Conejo pass up to 2500' was fogged in. Those conditions had persisted for hours, so I'm completely unclear as to how he'd have filed a flight plan to do this trip given the poor VFR conditions enroute. I'm mystified by this so perhaps the helicopter pilots here can fill in the details. Because it looks like he either would have had to scrub or transit some ugly IMC to get there. It's baffling.
Curt
I live 1 mile from the location and drove by some 0 minutes before the accident. The weather was grim. Certainly not the more usual marine layer that rarely comes down to ground level. This morning it was a wet fog that shrouded the hills. Not wet through rain but wet from the thick fog. You could not see the crash site from half a mile away on the 101.
Point is, it had been foggy since dawn. VNY and BUR were both IMC.
The Part 135 operating license was VFR only.
Senseless.