Understood. I was simply responding to the catch-all comment that no helicopter can survive an engine failure (he wasn't talking about TR failure) "from a free air hover between 50' and 1,000'".

The helicopter is at Farnborough.

Having watched the video's it looks like the a/c just dropped while spinning. If the pilot had become incapacitated I doubt the front seat passenger would have had time to do anything with the controls.

In the offshore industry pilots are trained incase a pilot ever becomes incapacitated. The technique used is to pull back on the collapsed pilots harness, which isn't as easy as it looks, while making sure the seat harness locks are on, to stop the pilot falling forward onto the controls.

In the video taken from the pitch it would appear that the a/c engines are still running during the descent as there doesn't appear to be any change in the noise, so the pilot didn't turn the engines off. The witness on the ground said it went silent? Maybe lack of tail rotor noise on the descent?

The lack of any AD's nearly a week since the accident to check other AW169's, makes me wonder if the AAIB haven't found any obvious mechanical failures at the moment? Does the AW169 type have a cockpit voice recorder?

What surprised me watching the video taken near to the crash site was the way the post crash fire seemed to consume the cabin Very quickly. The two brave pc's who approached the crashed a/c managed to get close to the cockpit until an explosion made them move away. Don't Leonardo fit crash proof fuel tanks to this new type of a/c?
When was it last serviced, and was the AD sent out to all operators in Sept 2018 for the Emergency Windows, actually completed?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan...shire-46017499

Or Mute swans, there are plenty on the river and they do overly the KP as i have seen many times at games myself even in the dark and they are even larger than a goose up to 33 ibs Hitting the TR disk square on with little fwd speed or drifting backwards is a much higher chance than in fwd flight already mention back at the start and being under high loading at that point probably more catastrophic failure

https://www.pprune.org/rotorheads/61...l#post10295630

If it was a large illegally flown drone, then the police would already have been alerted due to debris found at scene on the Sunday night and be actively pursuing or arresting someone and it would be in the media IMHO
Any other failure due to component failure would have serious global implications and there is no grounding or inspections going on

I have no knowledge of the direction the pilot was heading in, but there are power lines on one side of the KP stadium which appear to be higher than the stands. The stadium is actually quite compact, and the stands aren't perhaps as tall as you might think (about 6 storeys from ground to roof, plus the cantilevers)

Magplug, a very succinct description of a very possible scenario. The critical duties of a P2 following a loss of TR control is to to shut down the engines ASAP while the P1 attempts to enter Autorotation. As somebody else mentioned, with roof mounted ECLs, this is going to be difficult if not impossible for a single pilot. Whenever I flew with a non-rated person in the left seat, the duties always included a full brief on how to close the ECLs in an emergency, but thankfully I never got to find out if any of that information had been absorbed.

This incident is surely the worst case scenario that any helicopter crew could experience. So far there has been very little advice offered on how you might survive such an event, presumably because few ever have. As an SAR pilot I have spent the majority of my career in high OGE hovers and TR failure was never far from mind. With that in mind I always took the opportunity during simulator currency trips to attempt to recover from a 300 feet OGE hover; the advice given which I tried to follow was- lower the collective, nose down for airspeed and roll into the turn then kill the engines if you could . The result was always a crash landing which was sometimes survivable. I know the sim is only as good as the engineer's model but for now it is the best we have but the one thing it cannot do is replicate the centrifugal force associated with the violent yaw experienced during a TR fail. Like Crab, I also knew and talked to the pilot involved in the Wessex incident and my stand out memory was him saying how hard it was to reach the speed select levers which were right next to the collective due to the spinning forces; more chilling was that I had delivered that airframe to Valley the week before and it could have been me.

Watching the video of this incident I would say that the pilot had cocked off to the left during the backup, as would be normal, and that the tail failure happens(if that is what happened) just as he kicks it straight prior to transition to forward flight. Is it possible that the two events are linked? I mention this because the Wessex incident happened during a tail rotor malfunction demo with an large pedal input used to simulate the malfunction.

Does the 169 still have roof mounted ECL's? I think, like most dual FADEC ships, they just have Engine Main Switches on the centerconsole or instrument panel.

skadi

@EwanWhoseArmy... The Dead mans Curve is establshed during test flying of a new type. A couple of test pilots start at say 2000' in the hover and chop the engine just as your instructor on the R22 did. They then enter autorotation and land. At the next attempt they bring the height down by 100' and repeat.... until they scare each other at which point they put an X on the graph and move on to the next part of the test. The Dead-Man's curve for the R22 will look very different to the profile for an AW169. Remember also... In a twin-engined helo the significance of the DMC is much less because you have two engines and the chances of one failing is very slim, the chances of two failing together in normal operation is infintisimal.

The safest way to leave a confined area like a football stadium involves balancing risks in order to minimise you exposure to them....

- Climb vertically until you are clear of obstructions and in 'clean air'.
- For a twin-engined helo continue climbing until you have sufficient height clear of obstructions that you will clear them in transition if one engine fails and you lose some height.
- Transition to forward flight as soon as possible
- For a single engined helo do all of the above minimising your time inside the dead-mans curve.

FWIW I didn't see anything particularly unusual about the height he climbed to on the night of the accident.

@VintageEngineer... Whilst some of what you say about the TR debris is valid, you are drawing way too many conclusions from a simple photo. TR blades are of a complicated composite construction and the AAIB engineers will have to put it all under a microscope before pronouncing on the cause of failure.

torquetalk - that manoeuvre was part of the standard post-maintenance flight test for a Sea King (much bigger than a 169) so there is no reason to expect that it hasn't been done on the 169 for certification purposes to demonstrate sufficient TR authority/control margin.

Myra - remember that it was the simulation of the TR/ASE malfunction that caused the TR disconnect coupling to disconnect - there isn't, to my knowledge, one of those on the 169 so an unlikely cause and probably the reason it didn't happen to you on the delivery flight:ok:

Could be indeed, and I wholeheartedly agree with you.

It was the swiftness with which pilot incapacitation was dismissed based on the behaviour of the aircraft that made me wonder if it was an evidence based response.

The Sun's video shows the (red) strobe light clearly and it illuminates the disc in an interesting way. It flashes as regularly (a fraction over 1Hz) as you'd expect but something changes when the helicopter spins, even at the start of the spin it's not obvious anymore. I don't think strobe has stopped but something looks odd there. It could just be the yawing spreads the disc illumination making it far less visible?

Thanks Crab. I had assumed that zero speed auto plus pedal turn would not be required for certification. Genuinely suprised it was part of a release to service flight: Some peole have all the fun.

I've seen a sea gull descend into a turning sea king main rotor. The resulting feather explosion was impressive. A big goose and all those lights? Unlikely IMHO.

Zerospeed autos were done very frequently to confirm tail rotor rigging, did many as a FM.

I've inspected dozens of rotor blade birdstrikes and one thing is common, you will always find bird remains on all the blades. Looking at the photo of the tail rotor on the ground, there are no bird remains at all.

Fair point! A goose- "explosion" would probably indeed have been visible in the video although the tail rotor will likely not generate quite the same effect as the main rotor..

This was about dong pedal turns through 180 degreees (or more) whilst established in a zero speed auto.

The blade at 12 o'clock in picture has what appears to be feathers/remains on the leading edge

Looks like strands of carbon fibre to me?

Zero Airspeed Auto with pedal turns.....normal part of every CoA Airtest on Bell 212's for sure.

Yes, to both.

Yep, it's towards the top. Trumped by MGB seizure / MR separation in-flight.

Never heard of the procedure. Was this a routine procedure following tail rotor replacement, and apply to all helos? We had what I considered top flight maintenance, but all I ever recall doing was auto RPM checks, irrespective of type, military and civil.

Cyclic - it was 90 degrees to the right to check TR rigging in low speed (below 30 kts) auto, but you are right, it wasn't very comfortable:ok:

Myra - agreed, if he was doing the same confined area departure as in the 139 he would have an extra load on the TR by being cocked off to the left in order to keep the LS in sight - but why the removal of that yaw input at TDP would then cause a failure escapes me.

Both ships have counter-clockwise turning rotors, the tail rotor type on the G-LCFC is a pusher and on G-VSKP was a puller.

All the AW 1*9 family have puller TR on the right hand side and all have MR rotation anti-clockwise when viewed from above.

Simple question for my betters:

Would a lift into a low hover transitioning into a more 'horizontal' take off be inherently safer than a departure like this one? (Given a suitable obstacle free 'runway'/take off path....)

And would a suitable take off run have been available outside the stadium?

VR may not cause that effect, but if in VR with no TR drive I'm sure it would rotate. I should think this incident could well have entered VR on the way down without tail rotor drive. It had a high ROD and drifted down wind. We don't know about the power setting yet...