re: Media helicopter crashes live on air in Los Angeles

We sometimes fly up to 7 helicopters on fire restoration jobs, the pilots are mainly crazy but good (mostly from New Zealand) and there’s strict maintenance done everyday.

We’ve even run Blackhawks with no accidents.

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steeling with power

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I think you meant "settling with power". I had that demonstrated to me in a Huey and for those few moments I thought it was coming apart.

The media is scum and they all need to die.

A properly setup 2stroke gas drone is about $130K…pilots are available….especially in big cities. Flight time is about 5 hours. Three or four pilots to rotate and four or five drones and you’re set up. Probably need a chase vehicle or two for launch and retrieval.

turn the sound up. over the buzzing horn, you can hear the engine spooling down.

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In my opinion, helicopters are much safer than planes.

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I’ll never get in a helicopter or a small/private plane again if I can help it. The autopsy reports are just brutal.

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In my opinion, helicopters are much safer than planes. I don’t know how many hours I have sitting in the back of helicopters (Hueys, 46s, 53s, the occasional Blackhawk) but it’s a freaking lot. Only had two basically fall out of the sky…only a few hundred feet up both times…walked away both times. Not many people walk away from airplane crashes.

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Just because you didn’t die in two helicopter crashes doesn’t mean they’re safer than planes. Because the planes wouldn’t have crashed in the first place.

Francis Gary Powers, the famous U-2 pilot that was shot down over Russia during the Cold War also died piloting a helicopter for the same NBC station in Los Angeles.

The fuel gauge didn't properly register the amount of fuel so the pilots had developed a system for tracking what the gauge read versus what was in the tank. Then a mechanic fixed the gauge without recording it in the logbook. Powers took off thinking he had a full tank and then ran out of fuel. He supposedly might have landed safely but the chopper descended towards a school playground and he veered away.

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Well damn, that sucks.

I know you don't see helicopter crashes very often, but I imagine it's pretty rare that people survive those, huh?

And yeah, 14,000 hours of flight time seems like an eternity, so I assume this was some sort of mechanical failure instead of pilot error.

Sad situation.

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Definitely sad.

In Oklahoma City, all of the TV stations have one, and sometimes they fly pretty close to each other when they are covering an accident scene or thunderstorm. I've often thought that it is only a matter of time before one will crash on air.

One of the long time pilots crashed one shortly before he retired. He was trying to land it on the back of a flatbed truck, but it fell off the side while the rotor was still turning. He survived, but he never flew again, plus the helicopter was totaled.

I had a summer job back in 1982 servicing communication systems for off-shore gas wells. I got to fly in both small and large copters that summer. The pilots were all crazy Vietnam vets.

Later, after I graduated from college and got a real engineering job, I worked with an older Vietnamese engineer. I didn't know him very well, but he was able to get one of his grown children extracted from Vietnam back when Vietnam was still on bad terms with the US. He had a party to welcome his son to America. He came by my cubicle to give me the invitation, and we had a brief discussion about his life in Vietnam. He was a helicopter pilot in the Vietnamese army, and he was shot down over the jungle by the VC while carrying a group of soldiers.

In broken English, he was able to describe to me in detail how he was able to bring the auto-rotating copter down to a hard landing, and how he was able to avoid being captured by the VC. It was a harrowing tale.