Helicopter crashes into the Hudson River NYC
 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-injuries.html

Includes film of the accident, according to an eyewitness floats deployed just prior to hitting the water.

LTE, perhaps?

MightyGem, I hope your tongue is firmly in your cheek there?

Pretty strong wind blowing looking at the US Flag.....groundspeed was zeroed out and a turn to the right to a more or less down wind heading....at which point the rotation begins. The aircraft gained height during the spin and the tail rotor appeared to continue rotating at a steady RPM.

Being a Bell Jet Ranger that was involved....the notorious LTE must be considered the suspect!

What if there was some mechanical failure and loss of TR pitch which caused a power boost to the MR, hence the initial climb?

That has too slow. Too low. Too much tail wind. A tight orbit and he's worn a chunk of MR down-wash in his TR. Written all over it. I'd be surprised if there was anything mechanically wrong with the aircraft until after it hit the water.

As someone who has had a complete loss-of-thrust tail rotor failure at a hover in a 206, I can tell you that they spin a *LOT* faster than that. You have to experience it to believe it.

This one was LTE. Pilot-induced LTE.

Has - Run out of Ability, judgement and excuses written all over it... :ok:

Tired of the aircraft getting the blame for all these spills filmed in questionable phases of flight...

Pencil in one of those coffee dates with the CP; you know, the coffee dates without any coffee. "Oops, sorry boss for wrecking your helicopter...I won't be doing that again". Lucky he was over water, had the floats popped, and no serious physical harm to anybody. The insurance will pay for another one. Well, after deducting the deductibles, almost.

Slow orbit, tries to come to hover downwind (big nose-up attitude to stop groundspeed, so probably going backwards in the airflow). Gets to limit of pedal travel, starts to turn. Pulls power to get away, doesn't work. Lowers lever to reduce torque, heads for water. Looks inside to find float switches (and loses control of attitude) pops floats, looks up, says "Oh poop..." and splash.

No LTE. Unless you mean Lack of Training and Experience. Bell hasn't had anything they could pin LTE on since the bigger tail rotor came out.

Yep....the crash comic for that one will pretty much read like a .... well, like a crash comic. Shouldn't take long to write, just do a cut and paste from a previous one. Me suspects.

Yep, in excess of 180deg per sec. Make one quite dizzy. This was a leisurely yaw rate in comparison.

I think that question would be at the top of the list when he has his coffee appointment with the CP.

The powder that is packed around the floats to ensure the rubber bits don't stick together. Poooofff!

I fly a SPIFR L3 and at max gross (which it seems I'm always at - it's a heavy machine) there isn't a large margin of left pedal and torque available... Not as bad as an early Jetranger, but still... Turning into a tailwind and then decelerating to a hover seems to be asking for it. There were two places I thought maybe he was going to get out of it... he starts a brief climb... I was hoping he was going to try to get a little altitude so he could then lower the collective and have a little altitude to trade for airspeed... and then again when he goes down out of sight it's pretty clear to me that he must have pretty much stopped the descent because there's a pretty long delay before you see the spray from hitting the water... I'm guessing he got some help from ground effect, but probably the turning disoriented him enough that he eventually rolled it over.

Almost 30 years ago I flew with another instructor who had an LTE encounter on top of a small mountain (and he crashed). He showed me how to hover while yawing at a fairly high rate. The trick is to use the blur of the horizon/trees/whatever to keep the wings level and the nose from pitching down or up... it's not a comfortable thing to practice, but with some practice you can hover at pretty high yaw rates for long periods of time. If you haven't practiced it, it seems like most people lose control within 5 seconds... usually by dropping a wing.

I've been into W34th a number of times (but not recently) in the L3 and never had a problem, but then I'm always paranoid about power available so I'd never try a direct downwind approach like he did... let alone a downwind deceleration to a hover!

Yes, I think there is a lesson in there for a lot of pilots about wind, power and TR authority awareness.

Many of them forget that the loss of translational lift brings with it an increase in power required for both the main and tail rotors.

Used to see it a lot mountain flying where the extra pedal required came as a surprise!