Did he lose the T/R or could it have been LTE?? Don't know how the Astars perform on that front, only a simple 44 guy...

Fortyodd:

I knew that - I was just testing Rotorhead's collective memory !

Downloadable footage. (mpeg format)
 

Glad to hear all pax OK. As Steve76 said, lucky the first roof they hit wasn't any higher!!

To allow for closer inspection I have recorded the footage off my TV and converted it to an mpeg file, I have also slowed down the footage. The file is about 9.4mb, is someone able to host it for me so everyone can have a look?

Cheers,

Hollywood :cool:

It may have been missed in the earlier posts, but the fact that the warning horn is the same for both hydraulics failure and engine failure is really quite astounding.
I'm not sure how this got certified - anyone care to address this?
I've seen the video, but not studied it carefully - but there are a couple of places where the yaw appears to be pretty rapid, and possibly responsive to a tail rotor input.
We all need to wait for the investigation to work it's way through.

AFAIR,

The "klaxon" in the 350 is for 'HYD' and "RRPM". There is no ENGINE OUT warning based on NG (from memory). You have to determine which problem from the annunciator panel. Should really be treated as a MASTER CAUTION but with limited information.

Completely unrelated to this incident but FWIW - have a look here - Transport Canada AN

I haven't seen the video and don't know which model the aircraft was, but you can experience some difficulties if a servo accumulator is either "flat" or overpressurised. With a flat accumulator one goes out before the others and they tend to have an argument and the lateral and fore aft are shared across the servo's. Overpressure just gives you less oil to use!

Many have been caught out by the misuse of HYD OFF and HYD TEST. If you have HYD problems the system should be selected OFF without delay as per the RFM.

EC 130
 

Boy, these guys were lucky. Thank God they walked away. That must have been some workload in the cockpit. Anyway, as long as you walk from something like this.

God Bless:ok:

CaptHollywood
 

If you would like please send the MPEG video and I will upload it to my server, I don't know for how long the server will allow it but its worth a shot.

please send here

[email protected]

John, it was reported to have been a BA model.
One news cast last night showed the video footage from INSIDE the crash (ing) aircraft, just a complete blur on the TV screen, quite a wild ride !!

If anyone can find the footage from the gyro cam post it here.

The footage is on it's way Blender. It'll take me about an hour to send it as I only have a dial up connection. :mad:

Hollywood :cool:

The pilots words.......

========================================


By RALPH R. ORTEGA
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER


Pilot Russ Mowry, in hospital bed, says he was hovering when 'something happened.'


Wreckage of Chopper 4 copter is lowered from roof of Brooklyn apartment building yesterday.

Helicopter pilot Russ Mowry was shot down three times in Vietnam - but the crash of his Channel 4 news chopper on a Brooklyn rooftop was the scariest moment of his life.
"I was looking death in the face," Mowry told the Daily News yesterday in an exclusive interview in his hospital room. "I knew I was going to die."

Miraculously, none of the three men aboard was killed in the Tuesday accident, and Mowry, 60, was feeling well enough yesterday to give a gripping account of the near catastrophe.

From his bed at Brookdale University Hospital, where he was nursing a black eye and cuts on his right leg, he recounted how disaster struck in the sky above Flatbush.

He and his WNBC crew mates, reporter Andrew Torres and co-pilot Hassan Taan, were covering a police shooting for the 6 p.m. newscast. "We were sitting there at a dead hover at 1,000 feet and I was just flying the helicopter, and then something happened - it just came out of control," Mowry said.

The veteran pilot, who has logged more than 9,000 hours in the air, radioed the control tower at Kennedy Airport that the Eurocopter AS350's tail rotor had failed. The tail rotor counteracts the immense turning power of the main rotor.

"I just tried to control the aircraft, to keep it level," he said. "But when it went nose-down, that sucker was going down. It was instantaneous. It was all over before it happened."

As people on the street stared in horror and scrambled for cover, Mowry "was holding the trigger on the control stick" and hoping he would land on a roof instead of the street.

"I told the tower, 'I'm going down! I'm going down!'" he remembered.

The chopper jerked across the skyline, spinning wildly before veering toward the top of a four-story apartment house at 2502 Cortelyou Road.

In the moment before the aircraft slammed into a parapet, only one thought flashed through Mowry's mind: "I saw that brick wall and I knew I was gonna die."

The Lincoln Park, N.J., man said he cannot recall the impact - or how the whirlybird did a 360-degree flip, sheared off its tail and landed in a crumpled heap atop 2514 Cortelyou. "Your mind erases that," he said.

But after seeing a photo of the wreckage on the front page of The News, he knew it was amazing he escaped with such minor injuries.

"How lucky can you get?" he asked.

Mowry, a Boston-born father of three grown kids who races vintage cars and rides BMW motorcycles in his spare time, dismissed any suggestion he was a hero. He said that although his military training taught him to aim for a rooftop instead of the ground in a crisis, he was not able to control Chopper 4 at all.

"It was fate, the odds. It wasn't grand design," he said. "There was nothing I could do. I just had to ride it down. I'm just so glad I'm the one who got hurt."

The Army vet earned two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star in Vietnam, but says getting shot down in combat "was a cakewalk compared to this."

He said he expects to have vivid memories of the moment he lost control of the helicopter "forever," but insists they won't ground him.

"I'll fly again," he vowed. "I got a long way to go. I got the best job in the world."

Having watched this accident several times on the TV news, I wonder if the lucky 3 would care to buy me some lottery tickets?!!!
Currently I'm flying a 350 and am delighted to see that you can actually walk away from such a piece of tumbling tupperware!!!
Good luck to the 3 of you in your speedy recovery.:O

Gotto agree with Nigel,
It does make me feel a little safer in the 350.
Glad everyone is OK.
It will be interesting to see what the NTSB come up with.:}
May the pilot and crew have a hasty recovery and enjoy the rest of their flying.
:ok:

The aircraft looks like it literally fell apart on final impact, and how many squirrel crashes do you see that don't burst into flames? Non that I can recall!!
Lucky trio.

Burst into flames?????
 

Been associated with a few investigations into Astar accidents. Don't recall too many of them burning. Might have been that in the ones I investigated the crew had forgotten their matches.



STL

Capt Hollywood & BlenderPilot,
I'm waiting for the link to the downloadable video :ok:
Thanks a lot.

2 purple hearts.
1 silver star.
1 brown starfish:uhoh:

The guy's bulletproof....good luck to him and best wishes for a speedy recovery.

I suspect that the track record of the AS350 (Astar) and the AS355 (Twinstar) are a bit different. The AS355 seems to have a high chance of fire after a crash.

Hi,

I reckon thats because on the AS350 the fuel tank is plastic whereas on the AS355 its metal so l think thats the clue to why most AS355's burn on impact.

Regards
Del

Learning from the past
 

We'll have to wait for the final accident report to be sure, but the AS30BA has done this to a few crews before in the low speed envelope. Flight test has proven that a degraded hydraulic mode when heavy with a forward CG is not controllable. One military aircraft was lost in Aus under similar circumstances and the thread concerning the Native Air AS350

[URL=http://www.pprune.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=107709 ]

describes very similar symptoms (uncontrollable yaw and pitch oscillations). There have been others. See comments in the Native Air thread re certification.

Bottom line is that if you have to operate an AS350BA with high AUW and forward CG, try to stay in a profile that will keep you in forward flight (hard for media jocks I know). The accumulator in the TR system is supposed to stay pressurized in the case of a hyd fail and keep forces at a managable level. TR control forces in a couple of incident now would have to make one question whether in fact this has happened. The pressure appears to have been lost whether immediately (as per the HYD TEST case) or after a short time similar to the other accumulators which will only give you a minimal period in which to get some speed on and regain control. Even once in forward flight, the control forces (particularly collective) are extremely fatiguing. A run-on landing is your only controllable option (as per the manual).

There have been enough hyd system failures now that one would have to question the validity of the 10e-6 probability that justifies the simplex system. Grandfathering of certification is all well and good in theory but when practice starts to expose too many people to unacceptable risk, perhaps it is time to re-visit a failure modes and criticality effects analysis for the BA model.