Especially with two women who were unaccompanied by men to keep them on task. Probably had to stop late for a Latte

It's possible since it's a helicopter. If the pilot was trying to land though, I would imagine he would have tried to bring the aircraft further down and break through the fog.

ROFL

Thanks for not pointing out that you have more hair than I do.

Yeah, I'd imagine that's the hindsight for him and commenting on it.

With 3 kids chipping at each other constantly, I will probably pass you in that category, too.

Right. But I wouldn’t be thinking about whether or not there was rotor wash at the time to pay attention to what I saw. Or the sound. I wouldn’t have paid that much attention.

If he was MX or maybe ATC, he MIGHT be paying attention to the sound, but you're most likely right.

Spatial disorientation?

Couldn't see where he was flying so was going slow to wait for clouds/smoke/smog/fog to pass before resuming normal flight?

Hearing this makes me fear that the occupants burned to death. I pray to God that isn’t true

From the description, it sounds like he was hunting for the ground; a visual on anything on the ground. A road, a billboard, the overhead lights along a road, anything.

He had to be several hundred feet off the ground if there was no rotor wash effecting the bottom of the cloud cover, which the witness said was around 150 feet. This chopper was big if it could carry 9 people, so I'm guessing at least 300-400 feet off the deck? But surrounded on all sides by mountains/canyon walls. screw that noise.

If they were accelerating into the side of a mountain is, I'm guessing they all died upon impact.

Wonder if he thought he was hovering whwn he was moving first.

In that ship he should've had instrumentation that would tell him when he was in a hover? Probably should've had avionics that would put him in a hover at the press of a button.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cttx236mUIE" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/B0pQfgi9ZqU" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Remember it’s better to be a witness then you can’t be on the mishap board.

I stil like the Mo. based TWA cap. This guy gives his view without drama. Cleaning up those type mishap sites is also no fun.

Well the sheriff reported a debris field 300'X300' so yeah he hit that foothill pretty hard. He also said there was a pretty sizable fire that was put out. I think you can draw some pretty good conclusions by that.

Sounds like he was hovering, then saw the weather getting worse so pilot turned around or so he thought but went right into a mountain.

He said when they were right above him they were going that slow. Probably then accelerated into the side of the mountain.

But why? If you were going slow because you couldn't see, why would you then accelerate to 180+ mph when you still couldn't see? This just doesn't make any sense to me.

And don't they have collision avoidance systems on aircraft for just this sort of thing??

Probably a dumb question but what should the pilot have done once he encountered those conditions?

He was probably hovering circling around trying to get bearings or a visual. A 13 million dollar helicopter most likely had a pretty extensive avionics package probably state of the art navigation. Either it failed or he made a serious blunder and flew off in wrong direction that he thought was right considering how hard he hit that hill.

Just a guess here I am not a pilot but my guess would be get altitude and get above the low ceiling. Then get info on the nearest area not experiencing these conditions and land there.

So I'll let the actual pilots correct me here, but that green line rocketing into the negative figures has to reflect the terrain coming up to meet him, right?

Because the relative altitude stays fairly stead; never drops significantly. Meanwhile his vertical speed notes that he's 'falling' extremely fast over those last 14 seconds. From a virtual 0 vertical speed to a -5000 ft/s in the span of 14 seconds would be just pulling MASSIVE Gs if you were doing it when the ground is stationary. Meanwhile his altitude remained fairly steady...

Well since his height above sea level isn't changing nearly as fast as his vertical acceleration is, wouldn't that seem to suggest that the ground is coming up to meet him instead?

Just seems more and more like the pilot thought he could make a bit of a banked turn to get the hell out of that fog, lost where he was and drove the thing into a mountain at almost full tilt.

As to his speed - I can't say much about how to pilot a helicopter but my guess is that their handling characteristics are much more precise with some velocity behind them. That's just kinda the nature of flight; most aircraft suck at/near stall speeds and when they're actually moving forward, you get the full benefit of what they can do from a handling perspective.

I wonder if he was just trying to get the hell out of that fog in a hurry, was trying to keep his speed so he can do as much as possible to gain altitude and/or handling, and simply lost where he was. It would do a lot to explain why he actually throttled up in the minute leading to the impact.

This is looking more and more like it's damn near 100% pilot error with weather as the primary factor.

I might be misreading the graph, but it's over a span of 40 seconds.

Looks to be in a 1200 fpm (feet per minute) climb for 20 seconds, then descends rapidly (1000-5000 fpm!!!!) which leads to airspeed increase.

Altitude listed is MSL (Mean Sea Level), not AGL (Ground Level), and if we looked at a chart the terrain around the site is probably 1300ish feet above sea level.

4864 feet per MINUTE, not second. Just under 60 mph. Straight down. In a helo that's probably way fast.

Pilot also lost radio contact, and I wonder if that area or the conditions also had an impact there.

They didn't lose radio contact, ATC said they were too low to get it and therefore didn't have contact with Van Nuys ATC for the last :30

He lost 800' of altitude in 10-11 seconds at the end. Holy shit. Controlled decent in a small airplane averages 500 fpm.

Yikes

Yeah he was descending at nearly 60 mph. Hard to believe that was purposeful

Yeah, my brain scrambled there and I was reading the wrong side of the graph. He was clearly descending pretty quickly at the end there.

Now the negative vertical speed makes more sense. The tight scale of the correct axis and short timeline threw me off. Losing 800 feet relative to sea level in 11 seconds is incredibly dramatic.

So now I wonder if maybe there WAS some kind of catastrophic failure on the aircraft. What else would've had him giving up altitude like that when he's clearly looking to find visibility and has already held down low (and knows full well that getting below the cloud deck isn't a realistic possibility).

It is a hard graph to disseminate.

Flying in IFR conditions when your a VFR aircraft is the scariest thing on earth. In 1976 I flew with a co-worker in a Cessna 172 into Tallahassee Florida and all was well and we landed took a break and then departed southeast toward St. Petersburg.

I was flying with a fellow who had been an Army Helicopter pilot and was IFR rated in the military for helicopter, but he was transitioning to fixed wing civil license and he needed to make a trip with 3 legs with each leg 200 miles apart. We had departed Savannah earlier for Tallahassee and now were flying our final leg back to St. Pete.

As we climbed out to about 2000' he went right into the clouds, we were talking to Tallahassee Aproach and I kept hearing aircraft over the frequency calling for landing from the south looking for IFR clearance. We were VFR and climbing in the clouds towards the south, I was feeling very queasy at this point. All I could do was look out at the strobes on the end of each wing tip and see the light bounce off the clouds. He thought we could break through in a few hundred feet. As it turned out, we went to 13,000 feet before we got on top and we also had no oxygen.

I can tell you when we got around Crystal River I was so happy when we started descending and flying in and around the clouds until we were in clear weather below the clouds. It's a trip I never forget.

Crystal River. I've been to that airport a ton.

I'm sure this is universal for all pilot training, but when I was doing my lessons, we spent the first several weeks/months with an hour in the classroom mostly learning how to spot/predict weather before we did a 1/2 hour or so going over checklists and another 1/2 hour at most actually flying the plane.

You just know so damn little when doing VFR flying that EVERYTHING has to be planned out and if you can't plan it, just don't fly it.

Then again, I very much doubt Kobe Bryant's pilot lacked any sort of credentials. I'm sure the dude was certified in every conceivable fashion.

The mishap board is our best shot at determining the causes. But that is slow and deliberate.

TMZ on the pilot from other pilots that TMZ found again:

“ Even more baffling, we've been told the pilot was extremely experienced flying in that area -- and was even a flight instructor. One seasoned helicopter pilot told TMZ, he could not understand why Kobe's pilot would have maintained a speed of 161 knots in such dense fog. One of the benefits of a helicopter is you can go much slower -- even 15 mph -- to gingerly avoid terrain if you're uncertain.”

https://www.tmz.com/2020/01/27/kobe-...ain-slow-down/

And I don’t get all this concern about instrument flight....I’m kidding.
Mostly, says the guy with a Naval Special Instrument card and over 2000 hours of actual IMC time....
It does get your attention. Low level inadvertent IMC in rough terrain carrying pax (1of them Koby) I’m sure had the guy squeezing black juice out of the stick (cyclic) all the way through the end. Collective positioning at impact will be very telling of his last thoughts.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Breaking: Tuesday&#39;s Lakers vs. Clippers game has been postponed out of respect for Lakers organization after the death of Kobe Bryant <a href="https://t.co/Mn1p28aa3J">pic.twitter.com/Mn1p28aa3J</a></p>&mdash; Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) <a href="https://twitter.com/BleacherReport/status/1221926024478244864?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 27, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>




People in this city have been looking forward to this game all season but it makes sense

I hate to say it. What if the pilot was suicidal? Remember the plane crash a few years ago where a pilot did that and took about 200 people with him into the French Alps.

https://i.imgur.com/QXIygJx.jpg



I feel like there's a better way to say that

Yeah very rare of course. we’ll see that too (human factors- divorces, personal life, etc. will be looked at)

Last year I lost a too young father/husband civilian buddy of my son, that in part chose an airline gig after hanging out at my house for over 10 years that my family was sure was due to a suicidal pilot.

It was the Amazon contract carrier that impacted weirdly on final near Houston. My friend was just “dead-heading” in the jump seat catching a ride. The board looked at it all for over a year. Guy was just a bad driver and didn’t believe/follow his systems and instruments. I initially suspect similar here.

Glad I have nfl network

Seems pretty doubtful the pilot committed suicide sounds like the conditions went from OK a few miles away to really bad where they were at.

I asked this earlier and got no response. What should the pilot had done in that situation with the fog?

I'm no pilot, but to me, wouldn't you slow down? Of course, barring any mechanical malfunction.

It also sounds similar to what happened to Stevie Ray Vaughan when he was killed in a helicopter that went into a ski hill near the Alpine Valley Music Theatre.

Altitude?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1963_Camden_PA-24_crash

This says absolutely nothing about crashing into a cliff.

You sure you're not just remembering the Jessica Lange movie about Patsy Cline?

Sounds like they shouldn't have even been in the air to begin with.

He must have been flying very lower doesnt look like hes far up on that hill

I responded with an idea but I am not a pilot was hoping they would chime in.

Is there going to be a black box with voice recording?

It’s somewhat telling that LA County sheriffs grounded all of their helicopters around that time. Without knowing all the facts, I’m just going on 2020 hindsight, I’d say they probably never should’ve taken off.

I’m also fixed wing guy, not a Helo guy, and so unfamiliar with procedures, but I would’ve climbed above the cloud deck, and requested an IFR flight plan or vectors to the nearest vfr fbo. Then told the passengers that they needed to make other arrangements to get to the game.

That’s the logical F/W answer. Likely assumes you aren’t already below the terrain, following roads and clear to climb.

Below ridge lines , single ship, helo guys typically plan “lower, slower” then land. Didn’t work obviously. at his altitude, and the flight track may show him trying to climb to “on top” or other IFR handling at the end. That’s why I say the collective position at impact will tell us much about his final thoughts.

His initially not filing IFR tells us his preflight thoughts and gameplan. He is using Special Visual flight procedures. He is trying to maintain ground contact and picking his way through the ridges and terrain in the low areas using roads while staying clear of clouds. The fog is likely overwhelming to his gameplan.

He is single pilot aviating, navigating, and communicating, with PAX in bad conditions. He’s held outside of an ata for 15 minutes in SVFR conditions which is probably much less due to the fog.

Once he goes “Popeye” or Inadvertant IMC, he is apparently trying to turn around probably attempting to reacquire the ground (his gameplan) and loses situational awareness. (I’m guessing)

The reported airspeed track doesn’t make sense to his request and conditions though. He may be transitioning to an instrument scan and back to searching for the ground.

Turning around is further disorienting when transitioning to a split instrument and visual scan and helo guy’s typically assume maintaining ground reference.

The sound witness statements about hovering or 3-5 knots is likely wrong but causes further evidence of his attempt to regain the ground vice starting an instrument climb.

This is what I've been saying. It just doesn't make sense unless there was a catastrophic navigation system failure.

Awhile back on 60 Minutes they did a piece showing how hackers could take over an automobile via the internal wireless system. Wonder if the same is possible on a newer model helicopter...

It was the movie you are correct. I remember that scene. Well I guess I fell for what they call dramatic license.:p Thx !!

The S76 model has hydraulic servo assisted flight controls with a stabilization control. Meaning mechanical mainly so no fly by wire to be hacked. Few other systems to include NAV, could be so catastrophic by its failure, if possible to hack. The sound witness seems pretty clear about powered flight.

Probably the best write up of what happened in the pilots mind.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Helicopters...omment/ffryqoc

Yeah, it was definitely dramatized.

Wow. Just reading that scenario makes you pucker up. How terrifying.

Don't even want to talk about what happened on Bill Graham's helicopter crash.

Yeah, this is part of what I meant about procedures. More than half of this is just backwards from everything I've been trained to do. Things like getting lower and slower. For a fixed wing, speed is life. Getting lower and slower is just not in the book. You keep your speed and climb out of trouble.

And five nights a week I haul a Metroliner III into BUR, so I'm passingly familiar with the area. But I've never seen it during the day. To me I know there's mountains on three sides because they're on the chart, and I've seen the lights along or near the ridges of those mountains, but I've never seen any detail. But I know enough that I know I wouldn't want to be driving around 1000 ft off the deck in clouds along their bases. It can be a treacherous place to fly.

You slow down, you lose control of the helo and it becomes much harder to maneuver and change altitude.

So if this pilot had set it down in a parking lot near Los Virgenes road - would that be a huge black mark on his record?

Short answer: no.

Doesn’t explain the airspeed.Coversspecifically the lower slower logic.
He covers the logic with great drama but needs to add helo mechanics for full effect. Too many 90 angles with reduction gearboxes. Then add hydraulics to move flight controls and the only portion actually “flying” (producing lift) is above you spinning at a high rate. Ospreys are even more crazy’s

This is the other thing that feels wrong about it to me. They were doing 160 knots and descending at 60 mph at impact. Why the ****? Especially the descent rate. 2,000 ft off the deck, and you decide that falling like a rock into the soup is the best plan? At that rate, he was going to run out of air in less than 25 seconds even if there wasn't a mountain to run into.

This. Still just doesn't add up.

Last thing I'll say on this until the NTSB issues their report.

Descending at 4,8xx feet/minute is fast. Much faster than anything 99% of civilians/non-aviators ever experience in any aircraft. The fastest most passengers have descended in a plane is probably no more than 2,500 ft/minute.

Descending at that rate from just 2,000 AGL (?) is not remotely normal.

Seems like a thorough investigation of the pilot would be a good idea here

No but the pilot was flying blind. Eyewitnesses could hear the copter flying overhead but couldn’t see it. The pilot probably wasn’t able to see the ground and from there everything that could go wrong, went wrong. You can’t land a copter unless you have visual point of reference.

Bottom line is, that Pilot screwed up. He shouldn’t have flown that morning.

Looking at his route, the 101 that he was suppose to be following will take him right to Camarillo Airport. Why he would stray away from his ground landmark in such a hilly environment. On the tapes I can hear them restrict him to 2500 feet or below, it doesn't make sense that he would stray off course in such an environment unless he had total spatial disorientation. He basically was in IFR weather and lost ground contact, sort of like John Kennedy Jr. flying VFR at night in clear weather but over water. They can't tell what's up from down and the inner ear plays tricks. You would think a commercial pilot even in a helicopter would be instrument rated. If that is the case, they would of cleared them to 4 or 5,000 feet and put them on a heading and most likely would of been above the fog at that altitude anyway.

He may have thought Los Virgenes Road was the 101 through the fog and it pulled him off course.

Pure Speculation on my part, but here is a possibility that might explain the descent thing.

I mentioned before that my friend loaned their plane to a dude that wrecked it. Here's the story on that. He was flying VFR to Manhattan and hit some unexpected localized heavy fog. Tower had him change his pattern, then he tried to switch to IFR (which I think he and the plane were rated for) but he was alone, trying to navigate, switching to IFR in an unfamiliar plane, and got disoriented. He got to going pretty much straight down, and when he came through the fog, he was going way too fast to have any shot at pulling up.

It's possible he got disoriented or got distracted doing something different and lost track of his shit.

Again, pure speculation, but it's what happened to the guy from my town. And I know planes aren't copters, but it's a possibility.

This sounds scary as **** and reading it makes me realize the obvious that flying a helicopter is much different than driving a car. atleast when we see danger ahead in a car even with just a few seconds we can make moves to avoid the dangerous outcome. of course flying is much different.

Damn man that pilot knew shit was going down and tried his best. I just hope the passangers didnt and felt nothing upon their death.

**** man what a ****ed up situation.

Take this article with a huge grain of salt but supposedly Kobe and his wife made a deal not to fly in a helicopter together.....


Kobe Bryant used helicopters to get around Los Angeles, but he and his wife Vanessa Bryant made a point not to fly together.

“He and Vanessa had a deal that they would never fly on a helicopter together,” a source tells PEOPLE of the couple, who tied the knot in 2001.

Bryant, who was k*lled alongside his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven other people in Sunday’s crash, is survived by Vanessa, 37, and their daughters Natalia, 17, Bianka, 3, and Capri, who was born in June 2019.

The former NBA player, 41, and his daughter were on their way to a youth basketball game at the time of the crash, according to ESPN.

The same source also told PEOPLE that Bryant “only” flew in helicopters with pilot Ara Zobayan, who was among those k*lled in the crash.

Bryant previously shared that he began using helicopters while he still played for the Los Angeles Lakers as a way to spend more time with his family — and less time stuck in traffic.

“I was sitting in traffic and I wound up missing like a school play,” he told Alex Rodriguez in 2018. “I had to figure out a way where I could still train and focus on the craft but still not compromise family time.”

“So that’s when I looked into helicopters, to be able to get down and back in 15 minutes and that’s when it started,” he added.

black mamba down is going to be the title of the book

Dude, too soon!

(Looking around...)

I think it's a totally differnt ball game in IFR; so going from VFR ( his plan) to IFR (unplanned) in an instant (or in a very short amount of time) yikes. I'm sure he was instrument rated but this scenario probably happened so fast it didn't matter. But, I'm not a pilot...so, that's my WAG. probably went from flying VFR, 'cool, no problem' to "crap...I can't see anything and I don't know where I'm at" and that's when things/problems started cascading into bigger ones.


what a bummer of an event.

:hmmm:

We’re all just speculating of course. I think the same. I keep harping on collective position at impact as telling of what he was thinking. If it is near full up, he has a handful of collective and power trying to climb or go faster.

Contrary to the lower, slower gameplan logic. He may have been trying to avoid the ground in a rush or it combined with the stick position may point to disorientation from the inadvertent IMC in a turn.

My similar earlier comment from an Osprey mishap I once chaired remains for me:

“Loss of situational awareness led to ground impact resulting in unoccupiable living space.” Very engineer like to describe the deaths which in the mishap chain started with the basic bad judgment to fly with that SVFR gameplan in those conditions.

Condolences to the grieving. Lots of aircraft deaths this past week.

Gravity thou art a heartless bitch.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/27/us/ca...day/index.html