SAS, check out this picture of our boy. Regardless of how tall he was, in the aircraft his eyes are apparently just above the tall glareshield. I'd imagine that it wouldn't take much nose-up attitude at all to make outward visibility pretty bad. Now, before you go running your mouth (again), I do understand how parallax and camera angle can make things look worse. But don't even try to tell me that the S-76 is a good platform for slugging along VFR, down low and slow in scuzzy viz.
And cut the crap with all the jibber-jabber from Lindbergh about not blaming dead pilots. We get it; we're all pilots...human pilots. And we all make mistakes, sometimes fatal ones. I don't think you need to be an expert NTSB accident investigator to see what happened here. Why? BECAUSE WE'VE ALL BEEN THERE! The only difference is that *we* are all still around to talk about our dumb mistakes. Lindbergh's last line is quite succinct:
"Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes." EXACTAMUNDO, Chuckie! Again, I'm not NTSB guy, but I think that any of us commercial/professional pilots would question the
judgment of someone bombing along that fast, pressing on into decreasing weather and rising terrain. He didn't appear to have much of a Plan B. Speaking of which...
gulliBell, never mind "minimum-IFR speed." I don't think IFR was on his mind at all. Otherwise he
might have been prepared to do it. So tell me, what pitch attitude would an S-76 be at if you slow to 60-70 knots? Five degrees? Maybe some of the other S-76 whiz kids can answer that. It's a helicopter. You know why you never heard about IIMC accidents with Bell 47's and Hiller 12's? Because they only flew at 60 knots. And if that was too fast, you slowed to 45. I'm thinking that for Kobe's flight, even 90-100 knots would have been too fast for those conditions. (Obviously, 120-130 was too fast.)
We don't know exactly when he went IIMC, but he undeniably did. I'm guessing that it happened where the 101 goes through that "cut-through" or "pass" at that little ridgeline where it meets Las Virgenes. He'd been following the 101 pretty well up to there, and that's where it all started to come apart. So it was in that general area. So maybe the better question is: what speed would have been appropriate that would have allowed him to SEE the cloud/fog-bank he was about to penetrate and make a 180 before doing so?
