Near miss: parachutists and Bell LongRanger
 

Well, that would have got the adrenalin pumping. Well done to the chap who retrieved it all :ok:

**** would really hit the fan if the shut comes in the tail rotor of main rotor then you would wish you had a parachute.

Oooooh, I feel sick watching it. :yuk:

Reminds me of a time in my fixed wing days when flying a Seminole along the Vic Surf Coast under 8/8 cloud to hear "4 canopies away" on the CTAF only to see something black whoosh past about 100 metres away. Would have made a dent ... :eek:

Scary stuff - especially as the guy doing the untangling almost certainly was not secured to anything. At least if he had fallen and ended up dangling beneath, they might have been able to land him gently, unlike a hang-up in a fixed-wing.

f*****g idiots.

Makes a change from the seat belts being left dangling!

If the canopy had gone through the tail rotor, would the pilot have been able to carry out an autorotation or keep control of it?

What??? Is the quality of posting diluting over the years on Pprune - or am I a GOM?:ugh:

As a skydiver and PP currently in the middle of a heli add-on, scary stuff indeed! You are trained to "always protect your handles when moving about the aircraft" but obviously stuff happens, and obviously could have lost the entire aircraft, although the jumpers might have made it out OK. Scarier for pilots of "cabin class" aircraft as they don't have to wear a pilot emergency chute and so have no chance when the bits by the tail are totaled.

I was on a Twin Otter jump once when a guy's pilot chute got loose on climb out (skydiver climb out at ~12K AGL or so, not aircraft climb out). I saw it go out the door and center punched the guy through the door and out the airplane. Everyone safe although he had a long descent while the rest of us did freefall. I was worried that he was going to think it was all my fault but by the time he got down I had several other eyewitnesses from the load who were very happy with my actions.

Farsouth: the intrepid jumper who did the untangling was unlikely to be in danger if he had fallen, wearing a parachute as he was. The entire load appeared pretty cool and collected as they solved the emergency, including the unfortunate jumper who realized, with the assistance of the intrepid jumper, that the best course was to release the main chute from the harness (there is a release handle for this) and rely on his reserve chute. This is all relative to my perspective as a skydiver, of course! :)

aa777888 - thanks for that - I had only watched it once and missed the fact that the guy with the tangled chute had cut away and gone. I was thinking the "untangler" was sorting out his own chute.

I wonder about the Pilot's actions after the fun began?

Having done some Jumping many years ago myself....and have flown Jumpers in both Airplanes and Helicopters as a Pilot...I would have slowed right down.....to minimize the force of the wind on the Extractor Chute....and as a Jumper I would have grabbed the Extractor Chute by its top and thus collapsed the chute and enabling me to control it with minimum force.

This was a very dangerous situation and am really glad it worked out the way it did.....the Jumpers did a good job all things considered.

OMG
 

That must have been really scary for all concerned! I wonder if the pilot knew the extend of the potential problem?

@T.C. I thought this was actually a very interesting video, expecially after min 3:00

http://i190.photobucket.com/albums/z...ps9ecf4c1b.jpg

Very scary :sad::eek: And very close to ... One reason why we don't do that from B206 JR III anymore !

JR

Hmm interesting video

aa777888

As a jumper ( and jump pilot) that incident stinks of a too loose closure loop. Seems as though the bag came out first and then the pilot chute. I always made sure my pin went in really tight to prevent this sort of really nasty malfunction. The mango would have really hit the fan with a FW aircraft running in 80-90 kts

Maybe I should wear a bailout rig from now on.

The fault was traced to a too long closing loop.

Totally agree with Aesir, around min 3:00 was the best part of this video :D

Maxed-out and RotaryWing: I watched the video more carefully in full screen and see what you are saying. The bag is definitely out first. Thanks for pointing that out!

I jump a Racer and as you know Racer's pack tight :) And I never jump without a pin check by somebody who I trust. If somebody offers me a pin check I won't refuse out of courtesy, but I'll still make sure there's one by somebody I trust in addition to that. And a good pin check includes a good bridle routing check, too.

And if I ever decide to do the jump pilot thing I'm definitely wearing a pilot rig, required or not!

I jump a VSE infinity, no way my pin or bridle is ever coming out!

TC
 

I guess we are maturing gently? The risks the young pups do seem extreme, apart from military(who have to do it) who on earth would want to jump out of any aircraft?

Why on earth would you want to fly a helicopter? :ugh:;)

I agree
 

Après Ski seems much less agro!

Oh err mother. :eek: Flown a few jumpers, but never had anything like that.

Once had a Jumper's Reserve release just as he was climbing out on to the Wheel and Strut of the Cessna 182.....he had a horrible body position but crikey he left quick! No harm done to anyone.....but it was for sure a "Now you see him.....now you don't ...kind of thing!"!

Happily nothing got hung up or anything fouled by the Chute....probably missed the Elevator by at least six inches.....otherwise it could have very interesting indeed.

I was wearing a back pack emergency rig so I would have had a way out.....except the thought of jumping a single chute doesn't warm my Heart at all.

?
 

Ok when in doubt take a back up parachute? What on all flights?

The closing pin was dislodged when the jumper attempted to do up his seatbelt behind his back shortly before exiting the aircraft. The deployment bag fell out first, folloed shortly after by the pilot chute.

I had a guy do that once when I was dropping him out of my powered parachute. She all came untucked, so he grabbed it in his arms and jumped out. He made it safely to earth luckily. Was only 3,000 ft which was a small concern - not much time for a reserve.

So the choices were;

a) another jumper, wearing a parachute which is potentially mis packed like the first one, pops out onto the skid and successfully clears entangled chute.
b) said jumper accidentally releases entangled chute into the tail rotor
c) jumper entagles self in entangled chute.
d) leave well enough alone and land.


Mickjoebill

I'm with Aesir TC,

the damsel is clearly in a high state of excitement, an' she hasn't even yumped out yet.

cheers tet.

Aesir: My apologies I didn't make it clear. I was talking about SkyMong's post not the OP's. :ouch:

Thomas : In reply to your original post, quite probably, but as I am not familiar with helicopter operations perhaps you could humor my mong question. I have been told everything from the canopy getting shredded, to it taking off the whole empennage.

Skymong
 

Can you please translate your reply into layman terms?

No one knows what would have happened until the canopy released but my guess is that it would certainly have removed the tail rotor and possibly the entire tail section. The C of G imbalance alone would then have ensured loss of control.

Inflated canopies have removed entire empennages from fixed wing AC in the past.

nomorehelosforme
 

The closing pin holds the parachute closed; inside is the deployment bag which holds the folded parachute canopy. In a normal opening sequence the pilot chute, a small drogue, is released first which removes closing pin and then pulls out the deployment bag, the canopy the inflates after coming out of the deployment bag, or d-bag.

In this instance the closing pin was knocked out shortly before the jumper exited; this allowed the deployment bag to drop out of the container, you can see it trailing behind the jumper around the 0:08 sec point, the pilot chute was then pulled out by the d-bag and you see this also catch on the skid, after that the canopy started to come out of the d-bag and start to inflate.

Sky"mong" they would all have died if that had gone thru the tail rotor! Simples.

The easiest way around this would have been to have two way comms between back and front seat and them asking the pilot to come to the hover while they reeled the canopy in.

Absolute mongs the lot of them.....................:ugh:

TC that's very offensive to those concerned, and to me as a experienced parachutist.

Do you know they weren't talking to the pilot? Do you know exactly what was going on?

If the pilot had of brought the AC into the hover, then lost the tail rotor, what chance recovery? At least with a bit of forward speed there was some chance.

The young lad who had the problem was not very experienced, and he f*cked up, no doubt. But what happened next is a credit to the guy on the step and the actions he took.

Other than the canopy not falling out of the container in the first place, this couldn't have ended better, so keep your uninformed opinions to yourself.:mad:

TC and Skymong!
 

Chill out guys!

TC,

Do explain why coming to a "Hover" at such altitude would be the exact right answer? Do you think LTE might have been an issue if that had been tried? Would the aircraft have run into a risk of Vortex Ring State if that had been tried?

I assume you worked out the Performance Data for the Flight, had balanced the Aircraft Course and Heading against the Winds Aloft for that Height and all that before making your comment....right?

Would the induced flow of air moving vertically through the Rotor System work to lessen the air flow over the Extractor Chute or would it have created a different set of problems?

Do tell us how you would have taken charge of the situation?

I've got to go with RotaryWingB2 on this much of it.

As an experienced skydiver I can honestly say, for better or worse, that I would have taken the same actions if I was in charge of the load. It is in the nature of those who skydive, particularly those who would take a leadership role in a skydiving context, to want to solve any given problem and emerge victorious. And it is drilled into us during skydiving instruction that an uncontrolled canopy deployment inside or immediately outside the aircraft could result in the loss of the aircraft and all in it. So I know exactly how "the guy on the step" felt and what his motivations were, having nearly experienced the same thing he did as I noted in my previous post in this thread. To that end, if I was in that helicopter I would have done whatever I could have to control that loose canopy.

With the benefit of perfect hindsight and the ability to study the video multiple times in detail, if I was "that guy" I would a) definitely had jumper #1 cut away in exactly the same fashion, b) gather in what I could, c) wish I had the presence of mind to get one of the other jumpers on the load to ask the pilot to slow down to the extent practical and d) perhaps settle for merely controlling the mess as opposed to completely pulling it into the cabin (I can tell you my heart was in my throat the couple of times that pilot chute inflated as he disentangled it).

As a budding helicopter pilot I can say that I'd make the trade-off of coming to a hover (if possible) in order to facilitate retrieving the canopy vs. maintaining sufficient forward speed to deal with a possible catastrophic LTE, particularly because the risk of such a catastrophe would be greatly lessened by coming into a hover and allowing the skydivers in the ship to more easily solve the problem. Perhaps that is more reflective of my static line jumpmaster experience (argh, I just carbon dated myself :}) as I'm used to working on a step and hauling static line deployment bags back into aircraft than it is of my nascent helicopter experience, but nevertheless I stand by it.

I showed my wife, also a skydiver, the video and, after she exclaimed :mad: her immediate response was to cheer on the guy on the step and make the appropriate scary noises every time the pilot chute almost got loose. If the ship didn't have so much forward speed that pilot chute would not been nearly as exciting.