Originally Posted by
Torquetalk
That is a horrible accident Robbie. The pilot made a bad decision to continue for the rooftop, when they had space and height ahead to recover. The commital point was much much later than than the clear acceleration into VRS. The aircraft was also stable in VRS and not pitching, yawing and rolling, so really good conditions to recover.
Having reached the roof, the pilot slid long from one side to the other and then hit a small barrier tipping the aircraft over the edge and death. It seemed to me that the pilot and pax could still have survived the initial bad decision to go for the roof if:
1) they had lowered the collective progressively and promptly and got the weight square down on the roof.
2) running out of roof, lift the collective and hop over the barrier, at which point they would already have been out of VRS because there was no sink rate - but possibly out of the performance envelope, so it might have happened again…
It was a pinnacle approach SE. If the pilot had recce’d and done a power check they might have realised that the approach was a NO GO.
And was there any performance planning pre-flight? I’d hazard not.
You seem to be assuming the pilot knew he was in VRS. He may not have, hence the decision to "continue yo the rooftop".
Anyway, the flight was intentionally flown downwind to get the required angle for the photo shoot, so I'm guessing they did their performance calculations.
Thing is though, Robby pilots are generally only shown VRS recovery from an OGE hover, so we don't know what it looks like when we have forward movement, thus the pilot may not have even realized it, until the very end when he went to pull power to land.