Helicopter crash in 2013

I'm guessing the alarm was low rotor speed? It barked once earlier as well.
 
Wonder what happened..boom strike or just bounced it and put the blades out of whack?
 
Unit74 said:
Wonder what happened..boom strike or just bounced it and put the blades out of whack?
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4 dudes in a little R44 is what happened. Attempting to land in an area with roughly a 3,000 ft PA and with obstacles creating recirculation (increased induced flow) ultimately did them in.

You can hear the low rotor go off a couple of times even before the crash. The pilot bounced it because of lack of power then increased collective. That created TRQ that dropped the rotor. He either didn't apply full left pedal or just simply ran out of left pedal. Then he panicked and pulled what appears to be full collective. That exacerbated the right yaw and then the situation truly hit the fan after that.
 
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Should he have dropped collective and stuck the landing? I thought the corrolator would have solved the power issue.
 
Unit74 said:
Should he have dropped collective and stuck the landing? I thought the corrolator would have solved the power issue.
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The corrolator can only apply full throttle, if the blades are producing more drag than the engine can accelerate it through due to too much collective being pulled, it will still fail to build sufficient RPM.
 
Unit74 said:
Should he have dropped collective and stuck the landing? I thought the corrolator would have solved the power issue.
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Yep. Reduce collective and touchdown with a slight amount of right yaw vs climbing and increasing the right yaw to a point of be unrecoverable.

What they should've done is abandon the approach all together. With the low rotor going off on approach, that should have been a clue that they didn't have power for that area. Now, if this was an open field, the low rotor wouldn't have been that big of an issue. Problem were the trees and structures surrounding the LZ. I wouldn't classify this as a confined area but it was confined enough to 1) most likely create recirculation and 2) prevent the pilot from using ground effect and effective translational lift (airspeed over altitude) departure.
 
Mcfly has it nailed looks like settling with power to me...

I had an unfortunate experience in the 80's with an AH-1...Fully loaded at a range at or slightly above max gross. Winds had shifted with a frontal passage to directly to my rear and was blowing enough to be through ETL at a 200ft OGE hover check....as I transition forward I dropped out of ETL and headed for the ground.

It took a few days to figure out what happened. I hit pulling 125-130% torque and a drooping rotor.

We had been flying out of revetments all day long with no issue but the 180 wind shift close to the time of lift off and not noticed...

The same range was the first time we had Hydra 70 rockets and found out a hovering quad all shot would remove all the O2 from around the Aircraft and cause a serious loss of power resembling an engine failure for about 3-4 seconds....a month later the Army put out the notice that the problem existed. And banned the quad all shots...
 
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Warlock said:
Mcfly has it nailed looks like settling with power to me...

I had an unfortunate experience in the 80's with an AH-1...Fully loaded at a range at or slightly above max gross. Winds had shifted with a frontal passage to directly to my rear and was blowing enough to be through ETL at a 200ft OGE hover check....as I transition forward I dropped out of ETL and headed for the ground.

It took a few days to figure out what happened. I hit pulling 125-130% torque and a drooping rotor.

We had been flying out of revetments all day long with no issue but the 180 wind shift close to the time of lift off and not noticed...

The same range was the first time we had Hydra 70 rockets and found out a hovering quad all shot would remove all the O2 from around the Aircraft and cause a serious loss of power resembling an engine failure for about 3-4 seconds....a month later the Army put out the notice that the problem existed. And banned the quad all shots...
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I remember reading about that Cobra problem with rockets.

Had a rotor droop with changing winds as well. We were doing a resupply on a 7,000 ft ridge in Afghanistan. Middle of summer so MAX TRQ was only like 97 %.
Really windy and turbulent. I had approached the ridge in what I believed to be into the wind at about a 20 ft hover. I looked down and saw the TRQ was fine so I brought the tail right. Just then we caught a gust of wind with low rotor is going off and now I'm pulling like 105 % and settling. Slight collective reduction, right pedal and forward cyclic and we bailout down the side of the ridge. I'm sure the infantry dudes were probably looking up at us in confusion. Came back again at a different angle into the wind, did a two wheel landing, kicked the "speed balls" out and continued on our way. Ran into a dust storm on the way home but that's a different story.:wink2:
 
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