There's a fundraiser for the pilot's family on GoFundMe. I can't post the link but if you search the site for "help me get to Hawaii" it's the first link

I just got off the phone with my buddy. I believe Paul Matero was the pilot and N985SA is the aircraft. My buddy is a former career Marine and said his flight was nominal...He considered the pilot, from his observation, to have been beyond competent and said his flight was smooth... Weather came in after they landed. So, it would appear, whatever happened, didn't present on the previous flight.

Kauai Police Department have released photos of the crash location (not the site itself) on their Facebook and there was an interview with someone from the Fire Department on the Honolulu Star Advertiser site. The interview stated the aircraft hit a ridge and fell 50-100 yards before coming to rest. The location appears to be high up, somewhere at the very back of Nualolo.

Good point! From sifting through many reports I can tell that there are many accidents where the aircraft neither had a (working) ELT nor a sat tracker and where is took days to locate the crash site.

For what it is worth, having sat comms on board gives me one less reason to push on when confronted with deteriorating weather. I know wherever I land I can always call for assistance. (So does survival equipment, warm clothes and 'tons' of potable water...)

It would seem - unless there is clear evidence of mechanical failure - to be another CFIT pushing on in rapidly worsening weather.

If the reports of deteriorating weather are correct, it may be that the aircraft was caught in a gust as it was clearing the top of the ridge.
The canyon wall is extremely steep and the edge quite abrupt.

and surely a pilot experienced in that terrain and those conditions would have left a bigger margin to allow for gusts and downdraughts.

So one would think. But I don't know how much leeway he had within the canyon.
I've only been in perfect weather and it is spectacular, but with a storm bearing down I'd not want to be in it.

agreed :ok:

The crash site is a fair distance beyond the rim of the canyon, and it's not an area where turbulence and downdrafts tend to be a problem. Talking to people who were flying that day the weather moved in exceptionally fast, routes went from moderately open to completely closed in a couple of minutes. What's particularly hard to take is that Paul wasn't the type to take stupid risks, just a couple of days earlier he was one of the first to be cancelling flights for bad weather.

The vast majority of pilots who crashed are not stupid...They just got caught..... If you read full accident report, fixed wing or helicopters, the vast majority of pilots involved had experience and were good pilots. Experience is not a guarantee that you won't do any mistake because many experienced pilots do mistakes. It is just reality. And experience help you to push boundaries......As pilots, we deal with many different situations, luck is sometimes your savor, we all had very close call.

Everyone makes mistakes and the causes are well known and thoroughly documented.
The problem is recognising the factors that result in a fatal accident in your own behaviour.
Pressure, internal and external
We got away with it before, we will again

It has nothing to do with stupidity, and no one is just 'caught out'.
The human machine is flawed, we all are.
Almost all accidents are avoidable, the responsibility for flying into terrain in poor weather sits with the people at the business end, as uncomfortable and painful as it may be to accept.

Bell ringer - :ok::ok:

There's a number of nasty wind/terrain traps that glider pilots flying ridges need to avoid. Bottom line rotors can form downwind of a discontinuity and produce a shear of double the wind aloft.

Don't know how badly a 30 kt shear would affect a helicopter, but I had a narrow escape from one in a glider.

NTSB UPDATE HERE:

https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/...NC20MA010.aspx

The NTSB is investigating the crash of an Airbus AS350B2 sighseeing helicopter in Kauai, HI.

Investigative Update, December 31, 2019

NTSB investigators are studying developing plans to soon recover the wreckage of the air tour helicopter that crashed on the Hawaiian island of Kauai last week.

On December 26, at approximately 4:57 p.m. local time, an Airbus AS350 B2 helicopter, registration number N985SA, collided with terrain about 24 miles northwest of Lihue, Hawaii. The helicopter impacted a ridge at an altitude of 2,900 feet, then fell approximately 100 feet. A post-crash fire consumed much of the aircraft. The helicopter’s commercial pilot and six passengers were killed.

The helicopter was registered to SAF LTD and operated by Safari Helicopters, Inc. under the provisions of 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 135 as an on-demand sightseeing flight. The flight departed Lihue Airport at 4:31 p.m. local time.


The crash site on Kauai of an Airbus AS350 helicopter. (NTSB photo by Brice Banning)

The NTSB dispatched a team of four, led by Investigator-In-Charge Brice Banning, that includes experts in airworthiness, operations and family assistance. They arrived on Kauai, Hawaii, Sunday evening. Other investigators, including a meteorologist, are working from NTSB headquarters in Washington.

On Monday, December 30, 2019, Banning flew over the crash site to evaluate the accident site conditions and photo document the wreckage path. In the coming days the wreckage will be moved to a secure location where investigators will conduct a more thorough examination of the recovered evidence. Details and timing are still being worked out.

A preliminary report documenting facts collected on scene will be issued on ntsb.gov within three weeks of the crash date. The final report, which will contain a finding of probable cause and any safety recommendations, will be issued at the end of the investigation, which could take 12-24 months. The reports and any future updates will be posted to this accident web page.

Golden rule of flying in hilly/mountainous terrain in poor weather - always keep an escape route and don't be afraid to use it - you can always go back in if the weather clears.

Just read this, clearly the tour operators in Hawaii are on the defensive....

https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2020/0...try-is-unsafe/

And yet they don't.

Tour pilots in Hawaii do not have a monopoly on that do they?

Helicopter pilots are pretty stupid folks over all.....they continue to kill themselves for the same tired old reasons year after year world wide.

Care to offer your explanation why that is?

Pick a country....no matter which one and tell us why those folks do the same thing as all of the rest of the World in this regard.

That was the point.
Its not enough to shrug the shoulders and say "pilots don't have to fly".
There is pressure in all operations to get the job done, whether real or perceived.
Tour operators are particularly pushy to keep the organ grinding away.
No amount of self-regulation will change that and it is a cop-out to put the responsibility solely on the pilot.

Where tour operators are unique, wherever you go, most residents consider them a nuisance, benefitting the few. Being defensive and indignant won't change that.

If you read Ed Case's comments it's not hard to come to the conclusion that he's more interested in making helicopter tours unviable, rather than improving safety. Magnum operate solely on Oahu which typically has more benign conditions (and much better weather info), they have no presence on Kauai.

If tours on Kauai only flew in ideal conditions there would only be maybe 6 flights a year. Tours are frequently cancelled or rerouted for weather. The problem is this hazard relies on a single piece of Swiss cheese - the pilot - and it's well established that pilots make mistakes, no matter how well trained or experienced they are.

But weather decisions aren't really that difficult - the problem is pilots thinking they are better or luckier than they actually are.

Except that in this case things deteriorated very quickly, by all accounts. So the pilot may have been surprised rather than overconfident.
It would really be very frightening to be flying up the narrow canyon and suddenly be entirely in clouds, with downdrafts. Yet apparently that was the situation.
So I'm at a loss for how to prevent such accidents. The risk seems built in given the terrain and the local weather.

If the weather on Kauai is so unpredictable, then perhaps they should omit flying through canyons and just stick to the coastline?

I'm a little reluctant to say this as I'm fairly sure you have a lot more experience than I do, but I would strongly disagree. In my experience weather decisions are often difficult, especially in a commercial operation. It's hard to know where the limit is without making mistakes and getting into a bad situation, especially in single pilot ops. If you're over-cautious you're likely to find yourself unemployed in short order, especially as an inexperienced pilot. In the area in question there's essentially no way to gauge the conditions without going up and taking a look and 99.999% of the time there is a way through. I knew the pilot on this flight (although not well) and he'd probably flown this route well in excess of 10,000 times. I can still hear him saying "it's only a f'ing tour" when encouraging people to cancel flights and he was one of the first to cancel of all the operators on Kauai. There's clearly no way of knowing the decision process that led to him being in the situation he was in, but he wasn't the type to take dumb risks which emphasises that if it happened to him it could happen to any of us.

The Waimea Canyon itself is generally not too bad weather-wise. The accident site was on the transition between the canyon and the Na Pali coast. It's a somewhat hostile area, generally downsloping with numerous valleys, but helicopters fly over it rather than through it. Sticking to the coastline is impractical as there's a large restricted area extending from the coastline, necessitated by a very high power military radar.

“99.999% of the time there is a way through”

“no way to gauge the conditions without going up and taking a look”

With that mindset, there’s no such thing as a weather decision.

Pilots are constantly under pressure, from owners, operations and customers, and the statistics show that the outcomes are not always favorable, but often by using skills of judgement and aircraft handling, many marginal flights are completed without incident.
It is VERY difficult to resist those pressures, and as I used to work in Ireland, they were a daily issue. During the Ryder Cup I was flying a Jet-Ranger, and due to poor weather, I could not make the scheduled pick-up near Killarney in the south-west. I was requested to fly low-level,following the main-road, in poor vis and low cloud conditions, towards Killarney from Dublin, to look out for the clients in a red SUV, when I saw them (I seem to recall being told that they would flash their headlamps...), land, pick them up and return to The K-Club.
I declined the offer and after a polite discussion with ops, resigned on the spot as I was not going to risk being put in that same situation again. I have never worked as a commercial pilot since (not by choice by-the-way), and we wonder why rookies and experienced pilots all over the world push-on when maybe the better option is to either set-down, or not depart in the first place...

Have you been to Kauai? That is like saying "Let's do a Hollywood tour, but stay over the coast".... 90% of the time, the weather on Kauai is just fine, just as B87 stated.

Spent a month there back in the late 90's.

,...also flown a Hollywood tour,...nothin' special to see there.

OK, my point was more that the whole reason people go on tours is to see the interior of the Island.

While I agree a Hollywood tour is nothing special to you or me, (I have flown quite a few of them, also flew tours on Kauai for 7 years in a former life before fire), these sights are something spectacular to those who do not get the same vantage point as us.

I think you may have misinterpreted me, and I could have been clearer. I'm not suggesting pushing on regardless, I'm saying weather decisions are not always easy and Kauai has more than its fair share of marginal conditions and subsequent difficult calls. The 99.999% statement was a little bit of a mistake, I wasn't trying to say there is a way through in every situation but that there is almost always a route from the Waimea Canyon to the Na Pali coast. Sometimes it involves a detour but it's pretty unusual for there to be no way through. With that said, I have turned back there.

When I said there's no way to gauge the conditions without taking a look, I was again referring to the area between Waimea Canyon and the Na Pali. Unfortunately, that is the case. There's no radar, no meaningful observations, not even a webcam. The satellite image doesn't indicate whether the clouds are 2000' over the rim of the canyon or 200' below it. Even when you're in the Canyon you can't see what's going on beyond the rim, so you might cross the rim in sky clear conditions only to be confronted with cloud obscuring the normal route to the coast. Potentially you may be able to fly around the cloud, no problem, but you've got to go further to see. Now your weather decision has to be made very quickly, with passengers in the back, whilst flying, and potentially with other aircraft coming up behind you. Can it be done? Sure, but I wouldn't say it's always easy.

With that said, of all the tours I could have flown on Kauai, I cancelled probably in the region of 10-20% for weather reasons. I stayed on the ground for entire weeks when the weather was just a little too marginal. I have no desire to take dumb risks, especially for a tour. I was one of the more cautious pilots at one of the more cautious companies, but I'm not going to pretend I didn't make mistakes (although I did try to learn from them) - the weather here is unlike anywhere else I've flown. Some of those weather decisions were easy to make. Others were hard. They don't get easier when you're paid by the flight, not by the day, and you're working in an industry where progression is based on number of hours flown, not number of good decisions taken. I've heard people say "you're paid to make good decisions" but in the tour industry it's literally the opposite.

Excellent points. I was just talking to one of the "helicopter managers" on Kauai this morning. Obviously this crash, and the Novictor ones are in the forefront of discussions at the HAI Helicopter Tour Operator Committee and TOPS.

As I said earlier - you always retain an escape route and if that means a bugged heading on the HSI which you know you can turn onto and fly out , even IIMC, then even if the weather closes in around you , you have thought about your actions before the situation occurs.

Weather decisions are easy - can you see where you need to get to? No? Then can you get there by going lower or higher to see your destination? No? Can you approach your destination from a different direction? No? Can you wait for a few minutes for the weather to clear? No? Then that is the weather decision made.

When it doubt don’t go, if you encounter bad weather turn back, easy words to say.... but as said by many and sadly proven, peer pressure, Coporate pressure and possibly own financial costs pressures seem to contribute to so many of accidents that end up getting discussed on here.

Not sure how things can improve to mitigate these outside pressures to fly in what might be uncertain conditions, sadly, in my opinion one major factor is money, weather it be the guy with millions demanding his 2 pilots take off in his “all singing all dancing “ VVIP twin whatever it is, or a low hour tour pilot gaining as many hours as possible in an R44 that is getting pressure from the tour company “let’s fit another trip in before the clouds come in”....

I flew with a guy once who refused to make a precautionary landing in one of the bazillion open fields we passed for fear it would generate negative publicity for the company.