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NTSB: Copter missed helipad 4 times before fatal crash | SanDiegoUnionTribune.com
CARLSBAD — A helicopter pilot made repeated attempts to land at a Carlsbad airport last month before the aircraft spun out of control and crashed, killing him and a passenger, a federal report said.
The National Transportation Safety Board found that the helicopter ultimately missed the portable helipad, rocked wildly back and forth several times, spun in place for more than five minutes, and broke off the tail before being enveloped in a cloud of smoke.
Bruce Erickson, 65, of Rancho Santa Fe, had piloted the aircraft several times since September, but always before with a professional pilot present, the National Transportation Safety Board said in a preliminary report on the accident.
Erickson was president of American Bank in Montana and spent part of his time in Bozeman.
His passenger on Nov. 18 was Wayne Lewis, 60, of Cardiff by the Sea, a Realtor who was rated as a private pilot, not a professional, the NTSB said.
Erickson bought the Airbus helicopter on Oct. 29, the report said.
The entire sequence of events leading up to the disaster, including at least four landing attempts on the raised helipad, were caught on airport security cameras and several witnesses’ cellphone cameras.
The report said Erickson and Lewis took off from McClellan-Palomar Airport about 2:11 p.m. in clear weather. They returned a little more than two hours later and started to land at 4:24 p.m. on a helipad on a ramp in front of Premier Jet hangars.
A ground crew had rolled the wheeled helipad to the west end of the ramp. The helicopter approached the airport from the northeast, turned left and approached the ramp in a low hover. It approached the helipad from the east, facing the sun, and landed short.
The center of the skids touched the pad’s front edge, sending the helicopter “in a series of back-and-forth oscillations,” with its tail skid striking the ground, the report said. The impacts knocked the helipad loose from one of the chocks that was holding a wheel in place.
The pad began to spin on one front wheel, then the helicopter also began to spin. The copter then climbed, rotated, and 50 seconds later landed partly on the ramp at a 45-degree angle.
Crewmen re-secured the helipad by installing chocks on three of the four wheels. The pilot lifted off and approached the pad from the west this time. He made three more landing attempts in the next four and a half minutes, getting within five to 20 feet of the pad each time.
On the last approach, caught on video by a witness who stood behind a car for safety, the helicopter landed short of the pad again. The aircraft spun 180 degrees to the left as the nose went up and the tail rotor hit the ground and broke off.
The helicopter bounced, completely rotated once, then landed hard on its left side.
“Once on the ground, the main rotor blades and cabin continued to spin wih the engine still running. The helicopter continued spinning for the next 5 minutes and 10 seconds while slowly sliding about 530 feet east along the ramp,” the report said.
The tail boom, horizontal stabilizer and main rotor blades snapped off. The engine operated for 30 more seconds while fire crews doused the aircraft. White smoke billowed from the engine exhaust, but the craft did not catch fire, the report said.
By the time rescuers got to the helicopter cabin, the men inside were dead.
The NTSB said Erickson had flown demonstration and familiarization flights in that helicopter totaling about 8.8 hours since Sept. 20. All those flights were conducted with a certified flight instructor present. He had two additional hours of flight training on Nov. 13.
Friends and instructors told investigators that although Erickson had previously owned a Bell 407 helicopter, his final flight in the Airbus was his first time flying a helicopter one without a professional pilot present.