Bell 222 out of control accident 1997
 

I just saw this on YouTube, the part about the 222 accident starts at around the 38 minute mark.

Wild story, apologies if it’s been discussed previously.

Surviving by a lucky chain of events? Lol, been there, done that,...including the loss of confidence afterwards for a bit. Plus, as a city pilot myself, I've always wondered about doing an auto to a rooftop.

Good story, thanks for sharing.
:cool:

The stuff of nightmares! If it had happened higher up it would not have ended well

Skill is good....Luck is gooder!

I remember that one. But I thought it was in the early 2000s? Regardless, we had a 222 transmission out on the table pulling the input quills off when the entire head shed came out to the hangar floor and started pulling on the servo web. Once we found out the story... all I can say is simply amazing. Luck definitely gooder...

Check the NTSB report - one of the broken alignment dowels that had been found on the transmission deck was still in the C of M's desk top drawer from 12 months prior!!!

April 2000

https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/150932

I remember that also. The pics we saw of the incident aircraft were pretty impressive as well. As I recall, once the ASB and AD were released they found several others with loose hardware on the servo web. None of ours were loose but it became a focal point from then on. The prevailing theory at the time was at rest, the web was kept in its proper place so nothing appeared out of the ordinary. However, once flying things would loosen up and move around. Still amazes me today they got down in one piece.

Finally listened to this on my jog yesterday, was very interesting and thanks for sharing (to the pilot, host and forum OP).

Wish there were more interviews like this from the EMS and commercial sector but I imagine most people prefer not to say much about incidents due to professional positions, etc.

Most of them are from military pilots like ex-Vietnam and I've read a lot of books of their personal accounts.

Difference between a Fairy Tale and a War Story......one begins "Once upon a time...." and the other starts "Now this is no sh........... or There I was fat, dumb, and happy....".

Combat can add a lot of opportunities for you to have a story or two that despite being seen as being beer talk....are quite true and may have happened even it not to the story teller who is borrowing said story.

The real stories rarely are told as they strike deep within the heart of the teller all these years later.

I like the ones that are told by ther crew members were in the back of the bus .....that are told during reunions that remind you of those events.....but seen from a different perspective.

Stories like the one that kicked off this thread are of great value as accounts of events where Pilots have little training for (if any is possible) and how they managed to survive the situation.

As usual...I remind folks that to be an aviator one must know Gann (Ernest Gann of "Fate Is The Hunter") and Bach (Richard Bach of "Stranger To The Ground) and their many Tomes about flying.

We can learn much from others and their experiences and should avail ourselves of every opportunity to do so.

That helps allow us to go out and learn from our own unusual days rather than merely copying previous near tragedies.

I only experienced a loss of flight controls twice....one being a Tail Rotor failure at a hover in the middle of an Airfield and a stuck collective on a Bell 206 on final approach to a bush operation camp site and had to use throttle to reduce RPM with the resulting loss of lift to get the aircraft down....landing on the makeshift helipad in the normal spot.

The Engineer watching the landing realized there was a problem of some kind and walked to the side of the aircraft...opened my door....and asked if there was a problem with the Collective....which seemed either he was clairvoyant or knew something I had figured out all by my lonesome.

New bits were taken from the storeroom shelf and installed before the next flight which suggested that sage individual could see into the future......as I could not believe only "luck" had miracles the parts onto that shelf inside the Spares Tent.

Reports of "Sticky" flight controls should be documented and investigated with the results made known is the lesson I gleaned from that event.

The use of throttle came from practice in UH-1's during my Army training while practicing tail rotor failures and using throttle to control the heading of the aircraft in the absence of tail rotor control or thrusl.

I remember when this happened. I was also flying the 222 for Air Methods at that time elsewhere in the country and this was a big deal. Our first impression was how unlucky it was for that actuator support to just fail like that and what a great job by the pilot to ride that out and land it. Amazing flying right there. That's probably the greatest feat of rotorcraft airmanship that I've ever heard about. Later we found out about the dowel pin being found previously, the maintenance staff not knowing what it was, not having the curiosity to find out, nor the good sense to take the aircraft out of service until they sorted it. That part was chilling. Thank you for the video. It was great to hear the whole story from the pilot.

As far as this 222 story is concerned, I can’t get the link to work because I can’t get it to appear on my screen, which just shows a blank space.

As far as luck and aviation is concerned, I’ve always tried not to depend on luck. In my RW career, (all but over these days after 45 years), one time the grim reaper almost got me to my knowledge, but luck saved me, was when I was flown back to Odiham by a an apparently ignorant, or poorly sighted instructor in an RAF Puma.

We were a few minutes into a low level navex toward the end of my initial operational conversion course. The Puma gave me a red master caution light and a “BIM” caption to deal with. “BIM” stood for Blade Integrity Monitor. Back then, in pre “plastic” blade days, the MRBs had a hollow Aluminium D spar, which formed the front aerofoil section with individual, fabricated aluminium pockets bonded on behind to form the rear section.

The hollow spars were filled with pressurised nitrogen gas and they had a four inch long, “top hat” shaped, spring loaded visual indicator at the root end. If gas pressure was good, they showed white and yellow stripes along their length. If pressure was lost, the innards of the indicator moved under spring pressure to show vivid red stripes against a white background, for obvious reasons these were checked pre and after flight.

Due to the obvious importance of blade integrity, a caption lit if a BIM went red in flight but these warnings were often spurious. However, if the caption did come on in flight, it was a requirement to land asap and check the actual BIMs were not red. If one was red it meant a field blade change because the spar had lost pressure, possibly indicating a crack.

When the BIM warning showed, as a fresh out of the box ab initio I felt I’d done a text book recovery. I immediately climbed from low level, put out a PAN call and landed in a grass field with the proverbial telephone box by the gate. Having done so I immediately retarded the throttles and shut down. My instructor nodded his approval but told me to stay strapped in with the battery on and listen out on the radio because our PAN call hadn’t been answered. If anyone called I was to liaise. He and the trainee crewman climbed out, did a quick walk round the aircraft then wandered off down to the phone box to speak to our base engineers. They returned after a couple of minutes, during which time I’d heard nothing on the radio. My instructor said he’d spoken to the base engineers and been told we were ok to RTB. He told me to sit back and relax because he was going to fly the aircraft back from the left seat. He “horsed” it back, obviously enjoying himself - instructors didn’t get much hands on time at our stage of the course, especially at low level.

After landing the aircraft back at base he gave me control, climbed out and told me and the young crewman to shut it down and wait there while he walked back to the line office to arrange another airframe so we could carry on with our navex. After I shut the aircraft down I climbed out and carried out the usual post flight walk round. To my horror, one of the BIMS was showing red! I pointed this out to the crewman who said, “Yes, it was like that in the field, but the instructor spoke to the engineers then said it was OK to fly it back…..”

To say I was surprised…… I went straight in to the line office and interrupted the conversation! My instructor seemed under the impression that the BIMs were not showing red. His face fell and the line chief’s eyebrows shot up!

We were given a replacement airframe and completed the sortie. Nothing much was said to me in the subsequent debrief. A couple of days later the line chief came and found me. He asked me to come and look at what they had found. He produced a section of the blade, which had been sawn off a few inches either side of a major crack. The spar had been cracked almost across its entire section, from the back to the front, about a third of the way out from the root end of the blade. Once the pockets were removed, it had been possible to manually pull the spar apart along the crack. A intact aluminium D spar section was, iirc, approx 9” long from front to back, by 3” thick, with a hollow centre. The remaining intact metal was the “nose” of the aerofoil shape and was not much bigger than the length and width of my thumb. It was a fatigue crack, which had started at the back of the spar and rapidly grown. Flight time from the warning light first coming on was less than ten minutes.

Had we flown for any longer, two thirds of the length of that blade would have undoubtedly come off and I probably wouldn’t have been here to tell this story. did subsequently receive a sincere apology from my instructor, who not surprisingly was quite shocked by our lucky escape. I was quite pleased when the blades were upgraded to fibre composite ones.