Kobe Bryant S-76B UPDATE 31 Jan 2020

[Music] [Music] [Music] okay welcome to the hangar it's open hangar Thursday we got special guest Scott Munroe childhood friend we went to a nice school together back in what was that my e2 8080 once I just come out of high school Scott you come out of the paint shop or something yeah there's an auto body business airplane nut just like blonde and decided to go ahead and join all the other airplanes but then our careers diverged I went to college and got into Air Force ROTC and went the military route fixed-wing route airline route Scott you never did get a degree but went there wrote army wrote early worked as an A&P so we got our mechanic JP license for a while and yeah we worked for a couple years trying to get the ratings didn't have the college or anything got to get that out of the way so I wasn't qualified and also had some vision problems which were later corrected by the time that happened the army was accepting with two years of college so I went ahead and became rotary-wing pilot so I'm an airplane guy at heart chose rotary wing to make a living in aviation and I love it but I also have my foot in both worlds I fly in my own air puke I don't Bonanza bonanza I still keep current and everything and airplanes majority of my time is in helicopters and that's the way I make my living so yeah and you're currently working as a ems pilot and ride one of the major providers ems air ambulance helicopter provider here in Northern California and unlike a airline pilot career which is pretty linear helicopters you're kind of all over career well there's many pathways I there's no real parallel that I can see in a fixed-wing aviation rather maybe crop-dusting or something like that is a sideline you could fly utility in the mountains power line patrol you can fly news which I did four years right you could fly EMS you can fly charter sightseeing all sorts of things it's a very versatile machine and that's why there's so many career paths I think so we're going to talk about the recent incident with the s-76 B crash in Southern California let's take it back to before the the helicopter even leaves the ground initially I said that this crew had a choice to go VFR or IFR we've now learned that this operation was strictly VFR qualified only it's a charter operation that's VFR only so so they don't have the choice right that takes that option out of the out of the equation right so they can only depart VFR the depart Orange County and head up towards Burbank and do a couple of circles what are they doing there well because the weather was IFR that is ceilings less than a thousand feet or visibility less three miles all of the fixed-wing traffic or anybody that's on a fire IFR pipeline is going in to Van Nuys where they were holding short of on IFR flight plan shooting approaches they can only allow ATC will only allow one aircraft at a time within that five statute mile radius to Van Nuys that's their controlled airspace for instrument approaches so when that's in use they have to wait between approaches and then they could clear the VFR helicopter under special VFR conditions through the class Delta which he wanted to do just a transition to get to where he's going and that special VFR allowed them to operate in conditions down to a one mile visibility or even less in the case of helicopters well in helicopters part 135 is half a mile during the day and one mile at night so down to a down to a mile or half a mile during the day during this'll be a far correct for Part F AR part 135 charter operation which is the FA our part that this flight was operating under so again it's part 135 VFR only and then once he gets past that airspace he can just continue on VFR squawking 1200 which is the standard code on the transponder and continue VFR even as low as he was he was probably even in controlled airspace yeah even in class Gulf airspace on controlled airspace I hadn't had a chance to really look at the section we'll see if that was true but more than likely he could fly as visibility as low as a half mile under part 135 during the day part 135 right right but I have to make the point too that when he went through Van Nuys airspace under special VFR that's routine that's there's no problem with doing what the weather was reported eleven hundred and two and a half miles I believe mm-hmm that's almost VFR yeah that is a piece of cake in a helicopter you can slow down to you that at 90 knots all day long no problem perfectly routine perfectly safe no red flags at that point with the flight because the deteriorating weather really got deteriorated it towards the end of the flight now what about everybody else is saying they were grounded at the time of this fly well in the local area of Calabasas yes you would be able to take off Van Nuys from a helicopter in a helicopter no problem again eleven hundred and two and a half miles no problem you can depart there was nothing wrong with this flight in my mind that the pilot didn't till he's stuck his nose up into rising terrain and mountain obscuration those are big red flags and he would know that checking a a weather report prior to departure mmm-hmm so now let's talk a bit about the pilots qualifications and the mission of the helicopter the pilot was a C F double I helicopter that means he's an instrument instructor in helicopters but he's working for a VFR part 135 operation what are the implications of that well first off I found it astounding a double I someone that is teaching a person to fly instruments and helicopters apparently is not competent enough to control the helicopter now I don't want to be too hard on this guy he's very experienced guy is similar I have similar hours that he has similar ages probably similar maybe similar background I don't know if he was military trained but it is apparent right now that he lost control of the helicopter while transitioning onto instruments and for a double I to have that happen to them is really just there's just no excuse over mine to hold that ticket however is just a rating and you have to maintain proficiency if you're not doing it you're not teaching it whatever yeah just to get satrapy you have the rating doesn't necessarily mean you're proficient at that yeah if I have a motorcycle add-on rating to my driver's license but I never ride a motorcycle how good am I going to be on a motorcycle if I'd but this is not a skill that you have to keep it up now what is it about the market down there in Southern California so you're VFR only but you've got an instrument rating but you're always operating in VFR conditions right so you never exercise well and that's the problem the very nature of the helicopters mission it's a very utilitarian machine the IFR structure is set up for airplanes to flight Airport to airport if I was flying to Van Nuys I would know that the airport was being fart well doesn't be a barber who's eleven hundred and three I know I can plan about that the utility of the helicopter he's gonna try to land now in a ball field well over in Calabasas a gymnasium where the teaching or the coaching a game that's the utility of a helicopter it's a purpose of it mm-hmm if you wanted to go to an airport you just get an airplane it's much more efficient but the helicopter can land wherever the problem with that is you don't have weather reporting at this place what is it like in Calabasas I don't know you have to go by an area forecast you have to know weather patterns a little like this but you really don't know what the weather is going to be there at your destination so you have to go take a look you either say well I don't like it and you never fly or you go have a look and that's I deal with this today even you know I we go by area forecasts which are notoriously unreliable but to a some place that doesn't really have weather reporting and you go have a look you've got to have an out you gotta leave yourself a way out and then we talked about helicopters can fly considerably slower but we've talked about in the past why you can't hover in IMC conditions why is that well well the aircraft has some aerodynamic there's no secret to that in forward flight above saved 30 knots or so they behaved very much like an airplane engineers take a lot of time to try to make them fly with stability like an airplane is certified to do varying success on the type you get below about 30 knots and it starts to get into a hover mode the instruments are set up for flying forward where they fly like an airplane there are instruments available in military applications primarily in search-and-rescue coastguard and things like that that will hover that to enable a pilot to hover and even autopilot sort of program to hover a helicopter but that is not generally the case the Sderot dynamics the physics of it are completely different there are no queues for instances to tell me that I'm flying backwards helicopter can do it however there's nothing on the minute panel that will tell me that or sideways or you start drifting left or right no so the instrument the instrument flying can only be done in forward flight above about 30 knots it's very wise very easy to lose control to get spatial disorientation I couldn't do it the military the army taught us to do it but I tell you as a extremely perishable skill I couldn't do it today it took lots of practice to do it right from the ground yeah so then there's this discussion about the aircraft doesn't have terrain avoidance warning systems you've got it in your shooter it's required on the ems helicopters now tell us a little bit about that how do you how do you avoid you prevent it from becoming a nuisance when you're operating like in this particular flight it's such a low altitude to begin with well for one thing had I been conducting this fight this is me mm-hmm I will go into an area with mountaintops creation only during the day mm-hmm I would have the H toss pulled up and then it is the screen on there that tells you in various you know green yellow and red remain around you in distances so I know situationally where the mountains are I give myself enough I know how much time it takes to turn around and based on that you can go have a look it's it it's dangerous there's a risk involved with that you have to know when to you know cryo and turnaround or you know before what happened happened like that and that's the way I would I would do it but the nuisance warnings we do get that all the time we'll go to a scene especially at night and we're circling over an accident scene with terrain up here in Grass Valley and you're getting all these terrain warning terrain terrain yes we're aware of it we want you to be quiet no we have a button on the panel and we can silence that so you silence it's an audible it's an audio warning terrain terrain you silence that you still got the visual cue there but you know you're aware of it yeah under certain conditions you can you tune that audio warning down to 170 no no not on us not on ours it's fixed it's all programmed we don't have any control of that all you really have is an inhibit button or you can turn it completely off and that was the case in a Alaska Senator Stevens accident regarding seif it was a fixed-wing accident they found the terrain warning system was turned off or inhibited right Oh what would have would have caused or H todd's helped in this case do you think not in my opinion this pilot was very experienced to the local area he knew where the terrain was he knew he'd been through the past many times so really it's just going to you know he already knew what he was doing he knew where the terrain was it wasn't helping him he knew that he was in trouble he already knew that he was very low to the tray yeah you're very familiar with the area you don't need an H cause telling you hey you're too close to the terrain he's well aware of that so and then in the end he was trying to climb up and he was climbing up and away and getting safely away from the Train before he apparently got disoriented lost control of the helicopter so towards the end of the flight the helicopter makes a left-hand turn towards rising terrain one of the possible theories that some commenters came up with was was he looking for a way out in the form of that sheriff's helicopter pad just off to the left of the highway and you don't think that may be necessarily the case no because the fact that he climbed I've been in these situations before and I've read many accident cases survivors of these incidents where they did manage to somehow maintain control helicopter and at all cost they're getting lower and slower to try to maintain contact visual contact with the ground the fact that he climbed away means to me that he's accepted the fact that he's inverting IMC and he's attempting to do the proper thing climb away from terrain and recover well how do we corroborate this with the eyewitness with the TWA hat down there by the church he says he flew over slowly it would seem to me he would be making the left turn flying slowly looking for the helipad which would be right about where the church illumination was and then he disappears into the soup or the fog and then he initiates his emergency IMC client I suppose it's possible but they're like I think he pointed out the sheriff's pad was on the right he makes a left turn no no the sheriff's pad was on the left no it was on the left yeah I suppose it's possible oh yeah that is a possibility then but how are we ever gonna know without its data boys really we're looking at or anything like this yeah might remain a mystery right yeah helicopter doesn't stall like a fixed-wing aircraft the rotors can stall this doesn't seem to be much of a factor on this but can you 500 words or less you give us the vortex room what do you call it vortex ring state yeah or settling with power and it's something you have to be aware of an Allen copter when you're hovering and descending for the landing primarily the basically there's little tornados on the wing of any airplane and there any airfoil think tip cortices a quarter yeah exactly on a helicopter it's no different in forms those sort of a donut and as you descend if you get more than about 300 feet per minute in a vertical rate of descent you're ingesting the vortices back into the rotor from the top circulating them and that reduces the or increases the angle of attack of blades rather and the blade struck to stall in an uneven fashion you lose lift and applying power only makes it worse just increases the vortices and ingests it even more so it makes what you have to do is actually fly out of that forward or laterally into clean air where the rotors no longer ingesting them but again this is only a factor if you're hovering and descending at the same time for a de at what kind of rate of descent 300 foot per minute or greater and then you can be susceptible to or a downwind approach if you're a downwind approach and you're flying in 30 knots and you have a 30 knot tail and you're in the same condition you know the winds falling and you can feel that imbalance and we can immediately in the helicopter control over it can do all sorts of various things on it or unusual attitudes all sorts of things but unlikely in this case because why I think so I have a feeling I don't know this is the thing that's interesting to me it is quite possible that you know he was initiating a go-around inadvertent IMC he's trying to climb out if you let the aircraft get slow we talked about how you can't hover that instruments and I don't think he was descending vertically he was climbing away he have a rate of climb going so it's really impossible to get into vortex ring state under those conditions so it's more likely just playing old IMC disorientation disorientation you got to fault the pilot too much if he did indeed get too slow he was going slow and they pulled the nose up a little bit you can get below that 20 30 knots in the nobody could pull it off proficiency wise I don't know I am si on instruments enough slow and huh we've got to keep the forward speed a piece of trivia did you know that that Canyon is the opening sequence for the mash program does that I just set is right there I'll be in that Canyon yeah one of the questions the media was asking was during the final rate of descent was that a recoverable rate of descent in a helicopter hi that's an extreme we're talking 4,000 feet per minute or so yeah for only about a thousand feet that's an obscene I'm rate up the center I'm maximum rate ascent that I'll use in routine operations is maybe 1500 anything more than a thousands get my attention because it's just a pretty extreme yeah that's a big helicopter and you have that sort of mass going even if you got visual and he was coming down that fast in the last few seconds there's you can't recover there's no room to much span you have enough I'm gonna mow been two burgers actually do it happily what has the aeromedical always on Caravaca paramedical air ambulance what has the air ambulance industry done in recent years to improve their safety record they beds quite a bit of technological changes that this helicopter did not have you mentioned toss HT toss which is helicopter specific terrain awareness a warning system that's one years ago they required all EMS helicopters have radar altimeters which sends a signal of actual height above the ground 2,000 feet on down because most altimeters read MSL variety is a limiter barometric errors all things can creep in an hour low altitude environment a thousand feet or below these errors could be significant so there are a the radar altimeter this is a requirement they've also raised some weather minimums for part 135 EMS there's a whole table of certain conditions like the lowest we can really go now is 800 foot ceiling in two miles visibility that's the absolute lowest that EMS could fly a VFR and that's really kind of below my personal members I would not want to go out in whether in the old days I used to go out with half a mile and you had to go take a look at it's very dangerous and the record the accident record reflected that danger it was pretty horrific if you want to fly are you certified EMS IFR operations yes and in order to be certified IFR operations you got to have what requirements well you take a check ride every six months for one thing instead of an engineer and an instrument check right specifically to check you out and retrain and and refresh all of these skills that are in like I talked about a perishable and especially in the helicopter world that's probably why this operator was VFR only they felt that under their business they really did not need to spend the money and recurrency and all the things that that takes to maintain an IFR currency the few missions that it would require that they would not be able to take was not worth the money in the increased training so because this pilot had an instrument rating because he was flying for a VFR operator and he was not probably not getting regular six-month IFR currency check right here in to you correct that's correct Wow Wow and that's the problem yeah with helicopter flying as I spoke of the utility of the helicopter you want to be able to fly to these places but you don't have weather reporting so you'd have to go take a look and now you're in two areas where you're you're poking your nose into an area that is bad weather and because of the the FAA doesn't want to get rid of the utility of the helicopter so they let it fly in lower visibility and weather minimums VFR visually because they could slow down so you're flying in these weather that is worse and because the helicopter pilot flies 99% of the time purely visual his skills and instrument Recovery atrophy so the same mission that enables the puts him in the position of getting in bad weather has also caused the instrument flying skills to a Caterpie Wow and so you've got a marriage there it is not working out my pistol going on for years and it needs to be addressed I believe in the training side it's it becomes a training problem right because don't want to get rid of the utility of the helicopter that so whole reason it exists is to go fly these kinds of missions I want to go to the ball field I want to go to the helipad like I do you know point-to-point and part of that utility kind of still requires special VFR yes you don't want to get rid of that my idea unbelievably you can you can go get an instrument rating in a helicopter and the vast majority of civilian helicopter pilots have done this in say in our 22 CB 300 or some small helicopter that is not even certified to fly in the weather but has the required instruments they put on a view limiting device a hood which really doesn't work that good you can cheat you can see out and the slightest cue that you can see reinforce it's cheating you can get your entire instrument rating that way and have never been inside a cloud and I hate to tell you that that's a dirty little secret that 90% of the pilots out there they're flying helicopters just have that ticket so they can fly commercially it's required but they never use it again and never intend to you mentioned a IFR minimum requirement for EMS what was that minimum number of hours of actual IMC well our company restricts even experienced pilots when they're flying IFR and newly brought into the company they increase their minimums by 400 feet ceiling and 1 mile visibility in other words you tack those minimums 400 feet above the minimums suddenly approach they don't want a guy going out brand new shooting right to minimums that's that's a dicey situation they want it to be a clear-cut you break out good ok for the first year I would propose a similar thing be done to address this training issue getting an instrument rating a pilot that gets an instrument rating would be restricted to a thousand and three during the day 1,500 feet and five miles at night until he gets 25 hours let's say of actual instrument time in the clouds in a helicopter and then what then what then right well then you can address you know do we have higher minimums for another 25 something like that we don't know but data would have to support that clear we've got enough data that there's a problem with lack of proficiency on basic instrument flying by helicopter pilots it's a problem and I think that needs to be addressed yeah training issue right man you got any stories to tell us about your media dates I got to hear about your media days what was it flying for the for the media did you have to go out and make a story what is it that kind of already out on that no I it's over go ahead hon I got another no it's good it's a it's television news is weird anybody that watches has got and all that please it's so full of hype and everything and they've you know the bottom line becomes in that business I think in my opinion again being eyed blue news for six years don't turn the channel it all cause please do not look away you know that's the motivating factor so I have to say that yeah some of the stories I would get a little my wrist slap for minimizing the story no no no this is gonna be a disaster please don't look this is not compelling you know it's just to rub me the wrong way a little bit but I'm just a guy I like here on the blog oh there's your channels constantly tell me you on the edge of your seat what is he gonna do next now now the the company that used to work for has a helicopter pilot that doesn't say anything well and that's the thing when they go on air that costs more money they call it talent right so a guy that despise them Stu just applies the helicopter around a sheep you know I was a big-time personality oh yeah if you're talking on the air they give you probably double what they I mean the wrong business didn't that industry get in trouble for for hamming it up too much there was a that no I'm not aware of that is just no well no there was an action in Arizona which was a mid-air collision yeah but that didn't have anything to do with that aspect it was just too many flies dangers of yeah super what's been in the same place it brings up the point you got T casts in your EMS ship scrubs yeah yeah traffic collision avoidance systems yeah which el salón I say we get more warnings with that flying around you know the Bay Area San Francisco yeah it helps there's a lot of people out there flying and it certainly does give me a heads up good air tankers got that now too excellent thanks so much that was a lot of you again insight man into the helicopter industry and the training issues that the industry faces yeah I hope it's a I hope something happens here I'm reminded of believes 1959 weather you know they call the day the music died yeah yeah Ritchie Valens of the Big Bopper and how many celebrity body oxidants have we seen of this they gotta go they got to get there they and they're getting these charter operations in there and it's usually dealing with the weather and an interesting little tidbit part 135 as you described came about because of that accident at the Buddy Holly accident a bonanza of all things and in a snowstorm in Iowa the public outrage was so great that the befe finally stepped in and started regulating charter yeah let's hope they do the same thing here we can't sleep on the hill Graham yeah same old stupid problem yeah all right see you here [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: blancolirio

Views: 1,234,907

Keywords: Blancolirio, Juan Browne

Id: -ymcG-YKOCM

Length: 28min 14sec (1694 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 31 2020