PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - What was your scariest moment in a helicopter?
Old 13th Sep 2003, 02:54
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Thomas coupling
 
Join Date: Aug 2000
Location: UK
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Same sort of thing:

RAF sea king doing a hi line to a fishing trawler on fire.
The helo was drifting into and out of heavy smoke from the fwd end of the rolling boat. Bottom line: winch cable snapped (because the silly ******s onboard had tied the end of the hi line to the railings) and shot up into the rotors and wrapped itself round the rotor head
Pilot recovered the situation and they all survived!


I used to teach in a seaking simulator for a while for my sins. One of our lessons was on tail rotor problems.
A Norwegian SAR crew told me during one of their contract visits to the sim, that they were flying along one of their fjords at approx 600' once, and hit a hawser cables which was strung from side to side across the fjord.
It sliced clean thru their tail mast and took about 4 feet of airframe and the TR with it. In fact immediately after the bang, they started spinning and remembered seeing the tail rotor spinning as it went past them at the same height
They couldn't chop the throttles because of the G loading in the spin. Their only recollection was of dumping the lever and watching the world go round. The helo hit the water upright and they had enough time to get out before it sank!!
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