AS355(?) down near St.Petersburg, Russia
 

Helo (likely AS355) flown under "Baltic Airlines" flag sank into Finnish bay today with 2 pilots and 3 to 5 pax onboard. Passengers reported alive, pilots dead. No details yet.

Corrected info is: 5 onboard (2 crew+3pax), 4 alive, injured, 1 (pilot) missed.



Cannot imagine what happened. Pax were reported drunk.

Oops :yuk:

Flipn hek, if i was the pilot i wouldn't be flying no drunkn passengers, they could go for the controls or anything. Doesn't look like the helicopter suffered engine or tail rotor failure!

Never been in an AS355 ... could it have been hydraulic probs???

Still some reports out there that there's one person missing...?
Here is a news report in Finnish; http://www.iltasanomat.fi/uutiset/ul...asp?id=1391671 ; that says "According to News Agency AP there's one person missing." That report was updated midday on sunday.

Quite typical for Russians that they are slow to publish any facts, so the rumours are spreading:*.

Confirmed: 1 pilot found dead, 3 pax and 1 pilot alive, injured. They were happy - there were two men playing on water scooters 100 meter from the crash site, they saved injured.
They didn't inform about pilot until found his body in a sunk helo.

That's what I suspected. The original pitch up reminded me of that USCG HH-65 airshow footage.

Looks like a AS355N, which has dual hyd to the main rotor and single to the tail

o h m y g o d !

can't believe there hasn't been many more comments pondering the circumstances of this one on pprune...???

its hard to watch.....:ooh:

Seeing videos like this one, I have a mixture of a morbid fascination and curiosity, together with a revulsion that anyone took the video or is watching it.

Certainly a very unusual flight profile, and rather fortunate that anyone survived it at all. Perhaps the surviving pilot will be able to shed light on the cause. There seems to have been some pretty major "inputs" into the flying controls from somewhere...........

Wow, that video made my stomach churn!

I hope they can shed some light on what happened!

My condolences to the family and friends of the pilot....RIP

Jack Stall in As355N?
 

immediately following the accident the surviving copilot reported controls jammed...

the name of pilot who died was Kutuzov.

Jammed controls could certainly do that.

As an example, there is an AD on Squirrels about an anti-vibration weight which is located close to the run of the primary controls. If my memory is correct, some cracks have been found in the device that secures the weight. If the locating device failed completely, it and the weight would fall onto one of the control tubes.

Of course, it could be something else entirely.

It seems a very unusual manouvre for an helicopter like this, I think that the accident is linked to a thechnical problem to hydraulics system....

Very hard to see the video don't care about my stomach....

Regards,
Emanuele :sad:

Has an preliminary accident report been published?

There is no such thing as official preliminary report in Russia so this time we only have rumours which depends on what interests different parties involved have. Let's wait.

Was a cause for this mishap ever firmly established?

I find it incredible that some of the pax/crew survived that impact. The aircraft seem to break up on hitting the Ocean, truly remarkable......condolences to family of those lost