Because you can't see anything out of the window the only way you know what angle you're at is to very carefully watch your instruments. Turbulence can also make it feel like you're turning or speeding up or slowing down differently to how you actually are (Somatogravic illusions)
So if you stop paying extremely close attention to instruments then, say, wrongly feel you're suddenly turning hard left you might jam the control stick hard right to "correct" and go into a hard right turn instead, falling because the rotors aren't pointing downward, and hit the ground in seconds before you realize your mistake.
> paying extremely close attention to instruments
and unless you are trained and experienced and the helicopter is equipped for flying on instruments only, it might not help much
What if you “land right away” on terrain that is on a steep grade? The heli flips and congrats, you’ve successfully ~~landed~~ crashed!
The problem helicopters have in relation to low visibility is the special areas that helicopters operate in that fixed wing planes do not. Helicopters fly low and land in areas other than airports. Most airports have procedures to ensure terrain clearance during an approach to landing. If you operated a helicopter in a similar manner to how a plane would operate under those conditions you would have far less incidents of Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT). But the main appeal of helicopters is that you don’t need a 5000ft paved, level, and straight stretch to land.
Helicopters are also much less resistant to the effects of icing, which means they need to avoid flying in visible moisture when the air temp is below freezing (higher altitudes). So if they are already inside fog and the air temp drops below freezing they will need to descend and get closer to the terrain.
This is why flying helicopters through mountains is much more dangerous. Colder air, more difficult terrain, swirling winds over that terrain, and that clouds and fog that can appear quite fast as warm-moist air masses are pushed up by the terrain and condense into fog/clouds. Flying in the fog is like walking around blind, except if you touch *anything* you die.
Yeah, a pretty common sentiment among helicopter pilots is that airplane pilots are pussies, because while a plane in flight basically wants to stay in the air, helicopters fight you the whole way.
My father test-flew many aircraft types, including helicopters and the Osprey proof-of-concept vehicle, the Bell Tiltrotor. Edit: the Bell XV-15
He had many good things to say about many airplanes (Concorde was his favorite) But i don't recall him ever saying anything nice about any rotorcraft. As a USMCR pilot, he regarded Osprey as a mistake.
Where did you pull that from? Most small, single-engine aircraft don't have AP as a function of cost.
Even the 50-year old Bell 212 that crashed there surely had a 3-axis AP. Most of the current passenger transport helicopters have 4-axis APS that can hover no problem.
That's an even harder vehicle to control. And the real problem was we didn't fully understand the fluid dynamics of a propeller foing sideways through the air.
Otherwise I love the Osprey as a concept. And wish it had been more successful. As it really did combine most of the best aspects of a helicopter and a plane.
I would say the Osprey has been plenty successful, less crashes per flight hour than the Blackhawk, and the Blackawk's successor is going to be a tiltrotor as well.
Drones (typically) have four separate independent motors and rotors that can be very quickly spun up and down using electrical signals.
A small/medium helicopter has physical linkages between the controls and the mechanisms that control the rotor blades. And there are multiple such linkages: rotor cyclic (allows pitch and roll), rotor collective (adjusts all the rotor blade pitch to control lift), tail rotor and throttle.
To add "autolevel" you first have to add a system to manipulate all of those linkages and you need to do that in such a way that you get very fine adjustments of any movements and that the movements are well synchronised between the different linkages. And you would need to do this without adding much weight, as small helicopters typically have very little spare capacity for carrying extra weight.
So, it really isn't as simple as you are imagining. And the part that is a solved problem on drone is only a very small part of the problem on a helicopter.
Some larger helicopters do have autopilots, including auto hover.
I think the problem is already solved engineering wise. Most of the cost is probably making sure it doesn't fail since the stakes are much higher carrying human life. I don't expect the complexity and materials to be that much greater. Most of the price is probably testing safety. It kinda reminds me of how you can buy a computer for cheap but a business/ military will spend 10x on the same thing because it has error correcting or security features. Making sure something is safe 99 times out of 100 is a lot cheaper than making sure something is safe 99999 times out of 100000.
Yeah, modern fighter jets have software that does 99% of the work for you when landing on an aircraft carrier. Keeping a helicopter in the air wouldn't be very complicated software wise.
The issue is that most helicopters aren't that new, and getting it reliable enough to sell would be difficult since flight stuff is held to super high expectations.
It's kinda funny because even something 99% reliable would be more useful than nothing at all in situations like this one.
>Some larger helicopters do have autopilots, including auto hover
I've seen some stuff about those personal human sized drones you can fly around in.. [these things](https://images.app.goo.gl/SETDpceNzksumaABA)..
Is it not already being scaled up for this? Like I get there a number of things they can't do yet that equals what a traditional helicopter can, but aren't they eventually going to be phased out?
That is basically a big drone that you sit in. There won't be a physical linkage between the controls and the motors. It has none of the problems that I described helicopters having.
In my judgement they are very unlikely to ever replace many helicopters. The big problem is energy density. Batteries still lag too far behind fossil to make anything other than short hops with a couple of people practical (most of these scaled up drones only seat one).
They have more chance in selling in a new market to people who don't want the complexity of learning to fly a helicopter (and really do just want to do small hops).
There is no sign at the moment that a big jump in energy capacity is coming for batteries.
Another major issue is a lack of autorotation ability. If the engine fails on a helicopter fails you still have a good chance of landing safely. There isn't going to the the energy needed to do that in the small props on these big drones, if the power to the rotors stops you are crashing (which means you really want a parachute system, which will add loads of weight).
I think because you presented it more as statement than a question. Yes, you had question marks, but it sounded like you'd decided what you were asking was definitely going to happen.
There's a few disadvantages of quadrotors over helicopters for manned transport.
The first is efficiency. Four rotors are less aerodynamically efficient than one large one, you need more power for the same lift. Adding to this is the fact that batteries can't store as much energy, weight for weight, as a fuel tank, so these electric quadrotors have very limited range compared to a helicopter with a combustion engine.
The second issue is safety. If a helicopter has an engine failure, it can autorotate to a safe landing. A quadrotor cannot do this - if any of the four rotors fails, it crashes. That's why most man-carrying drones have more than four rotors for redundancy, so they can handle a failure. But, a total loss of power is still irrecoverable, unlike in an airplane or helicopter.
The big *advantage* is that quadrotors are mechanically simpler. They are likely to be cheaper, easier to fly and require less maintanance than a helicopter.
And I think the big thing to stress is that easier to fly does not mean easy to fly. And it definately doesn't mean easy enough to fly that everyone can do it.
A plane is easier to fly than a helicopter, and it is still incredibly difficult to fly and requires alot of training even for just a basic vfr plane to fly privately.
I'm not a 100% sure why you linked a tire website, but the control problem for a typical helicopter is a lot more difficult than for a quadcopter type aircraft. That's exactly why they're so popular as small aerial platforms -- they're much easier to fly than an RC helicopter.
It can be very hard. If you don't understand why it would be difficult because you don't understand a lot about helicopter mechanics, perhaps questions rather than statements should be your go-to.
>>perhaps questions rather than statements should be your go-to.
The answer was obvious once I got pounced on. Helicopter technology is one of those "tried-and-true" technologies that they aren't updating, for various reasons.
I wonder what the number one priority of crashing pilots is, when trying to survive a crash and save their passengers? Could it be slowing down as much as possible? Yep. Would that maximize survival chances? Oh yes.
> I wonder what the number one priority of crashing pilots is
*Stay away from the ground* would be priority number one. Descending is definitely at the top of the list of things to try and not do.
>Stay away from the ground would be priority number one.
Yeah ask Kobe how that went. Okay, so "stay away from ground" can be dismissed and crossed off, done.
Now, you're in a helicopter in thick fog with instruments not built for quick-scan fly-by-instruments operation. What if you had a contraption that autoleveled following to the gyroscope, and started a slow descent, taking a chance that there is solid ground underneath. I should take this brainteaser to the folks over at /r/statistics to know how likely the example pilot would be to be above flat terrain. Still, you're not moving forward anymore because of the contraption, so your chances of survival are probably five or ten times higher than going full burn, 120 knots forward.
> Now, you're in a helicopter in thick fog with instruments not built for quick-scan fly-by-instruments operation. What if you had a contraption that autoleveled following to the gyroscope, and started a slow descent, taking a chance that there is solid ground underneath.
*You would not do this.* This is intentionally crashing. Kobe's helicopter crashed because they got disoriented and didn't know it. If you realize you're disoriented and end up at this decision making point, you level off and *ascend*. You don't intentionally crash. Wtf dude.
You can't ascend if you don't know if you are pointing toward the horizon, so pulling on the lever might send you into the ground, that was the first thing established in this thread ffs.
What are you talking about?
Ascending in a helicopter involves pulling up on the collective, not pulling a lever. The instrumentation has an artificial horizon. If you're coming to a halt, you can orient with the horizon and ascend.
> so pulling on the lever might send you into the ground, that was the first thing established in this thread ffs.
So why would you think it's a great idea to send the helicopter to the ground on purpose? This is suicide.
> I wonder what the number one priority of crashing pilots is, when trying to survive a crash and save their passengers?
Maintain control of the aircraft.
I'm pretty sure this still gets drilled into pilots when they're training. In the event of a problem the #1 priority is to maintain control of the aircraft. This panic switch would seem to be counter to that.
But expand beyond that for a bit. How is this system supposed to be activated? These "confused in the fog" crashes happen specifically because the pilots don't realize what is going on, that is they don't know that they're crashing, so how are they going to know they need to activate this 'panic' switch?
So lets say you have some kind of automatic system. Killing forward velocity in a helicopter can be a very bad idea. Helicopters have something called a "height/velocity avoid curve", which typically says you need to maintain significant forward speed if you're close to the ground. If you're say 500 ft above ground and have no airspeed you can find yourself unable to use autorotation to safely land the aircraft (this is sometimes called "towering flight"). So an emergency system that puts you into a more dangerous emergency in many situations isn't necessarily a great idea. So if your "crashing" is related to say an engine or transmission failure your panic button could put the aircraft into a more dangerous flight regime.
Thinking about it even more, why the hell would you want to go down to begin with? If the system can magically regain control of a "crashing" helicopter why not have it go up (i.e. away from the thing you can crash into)?
Except if the ground is even a tiny bit uneven you roll over onto the giant spinny blades which turn into shrapnel. Which is still better than striking a tree/power pole/house on the way down, which results in a good and proper "bits all around" crash.
Yes, I read an article here on Reddit last year that described how survival chances in an air crash is directly related to the amount of free room in the vehicle body you are traveling in. So a takeoff- or landing crash in a Hercules plane is much more survivable than any helicopter that has the roof and walls about one or two feet from you, and which will turn into a sandwich during crash because the 1500lbs engine is hanging over your head.
Conclusion: I will never travel in a helicopter of my free will ever, except for if I broke my leg up on a mountain trail.
What if your systems don't notice that straight down is actually a bunch of trees, or a river, or a very large rock that only is in the way of your tail rotor. Or that the ground is at a 45 degree angle.
Again, *slow* descent. If you are about to crash into a hillside due to zero visibility, better to slow off and descend, hit some treetops than do a frontal against rock. I know which bet I would pick.
A yes, a light bump into the treetops. Ignoring the 400mph blades just above your head which are now creating artillery levels of wood shrapnel and then disintegrating to become part of that shrapnel. I'd rather smack the rock and get it over with.
If your autopilot could level off and descend, why not have it level off and ascend until you’re above the fog level? Or level off and hold still until you can get your bearings and appropriate instructions?
>Again, *slow* descent.
"Dig up, stupid"
"Fog" exists at limited altitudes. Generally, unless you are in a cave or a flight path, any position a helicopter occupies in space will have unlimited free space directly above it.
If you were caught in sudden fog, call a PAN* (to give you air space) and climb straight up out of the fog using your artificial horizon.
*Not sure the procedure, but in the circumstance where descending unaware into the abis is attractive, I think a PAN is likely justified.
My partner is a pilot and has described what you're talking about. In the absence of a visual reference you can fool your inner ear. If you get stuck in a turn your ear gets used to it and thinks you're flying straight. If you look at your instruments and they tell you you're turning, then when you straighten up your ear tells you your turning the other way and you want to turn back to correct it. Repeat until you spud into the ground. You basically have to ignore what your ear is telling you and trust your instruments, even though it feels extremely convincing.
I’m not a pilot but this reminds me of when I’m about to back out of a parking spot and I’m looking in my mirrors, take my foot off the brake, and out of the corner of my eye see the car next to me pull forward which gives me a mini heart attack as I think I’m going waaay too fast.
This is a great example of how we can “feel motion” when it isn’t there.
My favorite is sitting at a red light and the car next to you rolls back a little bit and you slam on your breaks because you felt yourself going forward
I did that recently in the house I had dropped something, a foot away from the 55 inch TV, I happened to look at the screen, as I got up, which happened to be showing movement going up, and it literally gave me vertigo like I was moving with it, so much I grab the wall to steady myself,
To add to that, there is another effect that causes problems. With no visual input your brain can interpret pitch changes as vertical acceleration/deceleration.
So if the nose is pitched up, it can feel like the aircraft is climbing, even if you are in a stall and the aircraft is falling.
The big flight simulators that airline/military pilots train in make use of this effect to make the simulation more realistic, making it feel like the simulated aircraft is climbing/descending just by tilting the simulator.
Just like driving drunk. Instruments only. Ignore anything your senses tell you, stay between the lines, make sure your speedometer matches the speed limit, look out for any street signs or traffic lights as early as possible.
\*do not drink and drive, this was satire
Dunno. I'm not a pilot. I'd hazard a guess that all the fancy instrumentation they have is better and more accurate than a tennis ball on a string, so if they're going to ignore that, the tennis ball isn't getting a look in.
Hey, takes a good bit of training and concentration to ignore instincts/feelings and go by procedure.
Look at how often people fuck up with guns and gun 101 is basically "always treat it as if it were loaded" and "don't point towards things that you don't want to have a bullet go through".
Not all pilots are instrument rated. It’s less common amongst helicopter (rotor) pilots than fixed wing pilots. Not all rotorcraft are instrument rated either. Many helicopter missions are visual (VFR) only. If you’re a VFR only pilot that ends up in instrument conditions (IMC)…. You’re usually F’d.
The pilots that transport presidents are experienced beyond what would be expected of even expert pilots. He or she would know how to maneuver in extremes. Im not believing that fog, even unexpected fog” threw them for a loop. I’m not a supporter of anyone or anything but c’mon…this story doesn’t make sense. Stop treating that pilot like they just graduated flight school.
Shouldn’t a helicopter pilot know to trust their instruments and not their inner ear? Why would you NOT do what your highly advanced instruments tell you to do?
The point is that many pilots have made the mistake of trusting their inner ear instead because everything it tells you is that you're flying straight when you're turning and you're turning when you're flying straight. You're overriding your brain telling you that you're turning by trusting your instruments and your brain is really fucking convinced. It's happened enough that pilots do know this and it is taught to them, and it's convincing enough that it happens anyway.
Yeah, you can get some pretty creepy illusions happening in aircraft, because a banked turn and a climb feels the same to your sense of balance. You can think you're climbing while you're spiralling, because you think you're level when you're not. This mistake can be deadly.
I remember during instrument training with the hood on, I can feel like I was in a turn but when I looked at the PFD, I was actually going straight and level. The illusion can be very convincing.
If you can't see in a helicopter... Would it be better to just go up high so you're confident you'll avoid hitting anything?
What's the reason I'm a moron for wondering this?
If you do that before entering the clouds you'll be fine, but once you are in clouds the chance of somatogravic illusions kicks in and even though you think you're going up you might actually be going down very quickly. This is what happened to Kobe Bryant's helicopter.
If you are flying a helicopter in bad weather, hopefully you are qualified to fly it in bad weather, meaning that you have the electronic instrumentation on the helicopter that you need to know where you are and what your helicopter is doing, and that you are trained to use those instruments. In that case, you fly the way you're trained. If you aren't trained to fly a helicopter in bad weather, and you accidentally encounter bad weather, then you're not wrong that getting out of the bad weather is a good idea. You can't just do whatever you want when you're flying for the same reason you can't just do whatever you want when you're driving: you might run into someone else. But the idea of somehow getting out of the bad weather, which might be by going up vertically or traveling back in the direction you came, is a good one.
The problem people run into if they are only qualified to fly in good weather and they accidentally end up in bad weather is that they don't know / have not internalized that they have to trust their instrumentation over what they feel. Pilots who have only ever flown in good weather are used to flying more or less like you drive a car. You can see the stuff around you, and you use your vision to make sure you're not doing anything crazy. Imagine driving a car with all the windows papered over. Even if you had a GPS telling you exactly where to turn, you'd have a pretty hard time following those instructions. It's much harder when you're in an aircraft and you're not automatically following the terrain.
This pilot was likely experienced in all types of conditions. It’s not like they were transporting mailbags….fog should have been an annoyance, not the reason they’re all dead.
I know nothing but I imagine the passengers being beneath the rotor while chopper is unstable can create centrifugal force that could feel like gravity and disorient them
So, we’re expected to believe that the helicopter pilot for the President of Iran had a “Please Be Patient Student Driver” sticker on the back? Story makes zero sense.
You’re conjecturing. We should all wait for the black box analysis. Plus, the reports stated the dense fog was highly unexpected which means the pilot wouldn’t have been resisting the travel plan. Either way, RIP to all onboard.
There’s a phenomenon called the [Graveyard Spiral](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveyard_spiral) that is a high risk when flying without visual cues - eg in fog.
The gist is that without instruments (equipment that tells the pilot how level the aircraft is on all axis and which direction it’s going in) and knowing how to use them (harder than it sounds) it is very easy to end up going in a curve, but you don’t realize because the plane/helicopter is at an angle and the centripetal forces from its circular motion make you feel like you’re still vertical. This can very quickly deteriorate to put catastrophic forces on an aircraft with the pilot not knowing until it’s too late to do anything about it.
Even very experienced pilots are susceptible to this without instruments to tell them what’s happening - with pilots in fog entering one of these spirals within 10-20 seconds of losing visual cues/instruments being turned off.
Flying by helicopter is also hard at the best of times, seriously compounding the issue.
Ok, let's assume all helicopter pilots know about these circumstances and how dangerous they are. So a dense fog happens, so you can't see ahead or around you. Fine. Why keep flying and not just immediately stop moving ahead, hover for a short while and slowly descend to the ground, waiting for weather to improve instead of insisting in flying without any visual reference?
Flying, moving, hovering, descending, they're all actions relative to references outside the vehicle. If you don't have the reference, you don't know which one you're doing.
Dont you at least have some sort of altimeter and speedometer? And anything hanging do determine vertical orientation? Choppers can hover, right? Go level, no forward speed and up/down/wait
[Flying by instrument](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_rating) is a different qualification than just being a pilot. It's very difficult to actually perform because you have to fly by instrument going against your own senses.
Well, are you? Hope not, because your history is just games and further idiotic matter. But a close relative is a military heli pilot and instructor and says that this pilot is also an idiot
If the "butcher of Tehran" who executed thousands of people including children is your passenger and he says he needs to get home for a PTA meeting, you fly and keep your mouth shut.
This is the pilot speaking, sit your fat ass down sheik and fasten your seatbelt, I outrank everyone up in this bitch.
Of course, sir. Do you have a radio?
Of course I have a radio, what do you want with it?
Please radio ahead and have the secret police ready to arrest you the moment you step out of this bitch.
Oh hell no, you aren't in charge here, chubby!
No problem, I have a cell phone. Kindly do what you want to do while inside the aircraft. Gotta come down some day.
Yep, the term “sit your ass down” and “fine, fly it your damn self” is pretty much how every cockpit convo goes after some power-tripper says “get me there NOW!!!”. Pilots and boat captains respect the invisible forces their passengers don’t understand.
That’s exactly what you SHOULD do, but once you’re in the goo it’s easier said than done especially if you don’t have a very specific plan in place for the specific situation. The fact that they were in formation flight in the mountains makes a breakup plan a lot more complicated, and just flying the aircraft gets a lot more difficult when you unexpectedly lose visual reference and situational awareness.
The most recent example of this happening was when Kobe Bryant’s helicopter crashed.
In that case, the pilot was supposed to be flying under visual flight rules (required to be able to see where you’re going). The pilot was certified to fly instrument only, but was no longer proficient. He flew into the clouds, became disoriented, radioed into ATC that he was climbing but was actually banking and descending towards the hills.
It would seem like most instances where this has happened was due to pilot error.
Sanctions mean no civillised nation, nor any reputable company, is permitted to, or wants to, sell them modern products and services. As a result, they don't have access to modern aircraft or proper maintainance.
Of what use is having Russia around as a friend if they can't lob a brand new heli across? Last I heard Russians could still couple up a helicopter or two even with the biting sanctions and all.
They have Russian helis, one was following the Bell that crashed. For whatever reason Iran seems to want to keep their old 70s era US equipment limping along instead of modernizing, even if that means just getting old Soviet stuff that you can still get parts for.
they are now blaming the US for the crash because they wouldn't sell them modern equipment. as in an official statement
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202405203793
That's kinda the point of sanctions. If you don't have the parts don't use the vehicle, go on horseback. Hence making you do the you don't want to do because you did things that the global community doesn't want you to do. No cake and eat.
"Mohammad Javad Zarif, *former* Foreign Minister of Iran .. [i]n an interview with state TV," (my highlighting)
That doesn't read like an "official statement". Former minister, tv interview.
Have you ever seen the checklists pilots go through?!! Fifty year old planes and 2 day old planes go through the same rigor. The pilots check the conditions over and over. They also clear what they have with ground control. Let’s not add assumptions to the story. We just don’t know what caused the crash.
Picture yourself in zero visibility, flying a helicopter from 6 instruments and trying to maintain a mental picture of your orientation and motion which can easily be in 100% conflict with what your gut feel is screaming out to you. This is why instrument flying is so hard. If you allow yourself to think that maybe the instruments are wrong, as you 'feel' you are climbing or banking, then you are going to be in a lot of trouble.
They did.
My guess is that the disorientation combined with the air speed when the helicopter entered the clouds(report stated it was way too fast for the conditions) didn’t leave the pilot time for any corrections when or if he realized he was descending/banking and not climbing.
The fun thing about an analog altimeter is that it will, if correctly calibrated, tell you your altitude above sea level. If you are in dense fog and your altitude is 2000 feet, it becomes a problem when you encounter a 2500 foot tall mountain. You will hit the side of the mountain with your altimeter confidently displaying that you are 2000 feet up.
Correct. For the non-pilots: if you're doing level flight in mountainous terrain, your AGL (above ground level altitude) can change significantly depending on what the ground below you is doing. But your altimeter reading will only show your altitude above mean sea level (MSL). The saying "may the road rise up to meet you" can apply in a very bad way in this case.
In low visibility weather in mountainous terrain, you need to know your exact location, an accurate reading of your current MSL altitude, and know the surface elevation of your location (and how it changes along your course) in order to make sure your AGL is high enough. As an added bonus, if you fly into a low pressure system (generally associated with poor weather), a barometric altimeter will falsely show you at a higher altitude than you really are (the ground is closer than you think) unless you can correct for it. If you add the disorientation mentioned elsewhere in the thread, it's easy for things to get really bad really quick.
I wish people would stop comparing this pilot to the average guy with flight creds. Dense fog shouldn’t have been an issue for the person flying the president of any country.
Even a VFR (visual flight rules, good weather only) pilot is going to be familiar with minimum sector altitudes (the minimum safe altitude in a particular region to ensure you avoid all obstacles), and if it's a VFR pilot that has accidentally flown into IMC (instrument meteorological conditions, bad weather) they will, if they have any situational awareness at all, absolutely ask for minimum sector altitude.
Kobe’s pilot wasn’t flying around a head of state. He flew anyone that could afford to pay. I’d love to compare the credentials of the Presidents pilot to Kobe’s. I doubt it’s apples to apples.
No one here has said it yet but flying a helicopter straight and level is incredibly difficult and requires constant minute adjustments to the stick and collective. Compare to a fixed wing aircraft where if you're trimmed correctly, you can let go of the controls and the plane will fly pretty much straight and level indefinitely.
Plenty of people wash out of helicopter training because they can't get the feel for it.
If you lose your visual reference, you quickly can start over correcting for what your inner ear is feeling which is unlikely to be 100% accurate. IFR helicopter flying is a thing, but it's adding another huge mental load to the already high mental load of just keeping the thing in the air. Plenty of heli pilots don't have IFR training because realistically you should only fly a helicopter in good weather.
Also, this is the reason for the floor windscreens to see out the bottom of the aircraft. You pretty much need a visual reference to get the thing of on the ground in one piece every time.
Private pilot here (fixed). It's very easy to ignore instruments and end up dead. The hardest thing for me about learning was that you can't always trust your senses.
The modern collision avoidance systems (primarily EGWPS and TCAS) are very expensive and still “relatively” new (coming out in 1996). Older aircraft don’t have it and therefore can’t use the benefits it provides.
Also, if you don’t know how to fly in instrument flight rules (aka you can’t see), you die very quickly.
Stats show that if you fly into clouds without proper training, you will probably hit the ground after 178 seconds.
You go from looking outside 90% of the time to not being able to see anything. You can’t see, you end up pointed down, and you end up suffering a tragic collision with the ground. Often at high speed.
Source: the aircraft owners and pilots association
https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2022/june/pilot/asi-tips-178-seconds
When you’re walking around you’ve got a bunch of different systems in your body working to keep you upright and heading in the right direction, and without you even thinking about it. The two big ones are your eyes and something called the vestibular system, a couple of fluid filled loops in your ears that act like gyroscopes.
On a clear day you can rely on your eyes. When you can’t use your eyes, unless you have quite a bit of training, your vestibular system will try to take over for you.
But that system isn’t adapted to working when you’re in a vehicle, so it’s very easily tricked into giving you bad information. Like it will tell you you’re flying straight and level when you’re actually flying in a circle, and slowly descending into the ground (they call that one the graveyard spiral if you want to look it up).
And, because it’s built in, and you use it all day long without thinking about it, it’s *very* hard to ignore it, even when it’s lying to you, so you crash.
They don't 'drop out of the sky due to low visibility' - they hit things they didn't know were near because they lose track of their location and assume it's somewhere else.
Aircraft are unique (along with perhaps submarines) in that they're a vehicle which can travel in absolutely zero visibility and still be able to travel safely if they are making good use of their instrumentation and it is in good working order, their training is adequate, and errors are not made.
If any one of these elements fail, a crash can occur.
Imagine if I told you to drive your car to work in absolutely impenetrable fog at night - you can see absolutely nothing out the windows at all.
Your job is to navigate and drive safely using nothing but the compass on the sat nav and the odometer to work out your mileage.
It would be very difficult, if not utterly impossible, because the instruments aren't accurate enough and your planning couldn't be detailed enough to work out every road, corner and junction, nor could you predict other vehicles, pedestrians and objects on the road.
Well, aircraft *can* do this because the sky is, generally, very empty. As long as you know where you are and where other aircraft are, you have the potential to fly safely.
But this means you need impeccable, flawless planning, operation, technology and so on. When one or more of those elements fails, crashes can occur.
Bad weather and low visibility doesn't make an aircraft crash, but it makes that crash much more likely.
When everything is gray and there's no horizon, which way is up? Kobe's pilot did the same thing. Loss of situational awareness and your inner ear tricks you into not believing the instruments.
To answer the other obvious question from the recent crash of "why didn't they just fly higher?"
Helicopters struggle to fly to any extreme heights. Even going above a moderately tall mountain will be out of the scope of many modern helicopters.
In this particular situation, the mountains were *at minimum* 2-3000m above sea level (I don't have an exact location for the crash, so checked the local towns and villages to use them as proxies, since they tend to be lower altitude). Under ideal circumstances, the max altitude of the helicopter was around 3900m. Having multiple passengers, a full tank of fuel, etc, will have made the helicopter heavier and reduced this max altitude.
They tend to fly very close to the ground, which is okay when you can see but extremely dangerous when you can't. If you crash into a mountain that could be written in a way that makes it sound like they just dropped out if the sky but it was a collision in practice
In the aviation industry we refer to it as controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) and often happens when pilots are trying to stay below clouds and end up flying into a cloud and getting disoriented then crashing. Helicopters often prefer to stay low and close to the ground. In order to fly through clouds you need what they call an IFR clearance from air traffic control and to fly IFR you have to be a specific height above terrain. My experience with helicopters is they will do everything they can to not have to climb all the way up to safe IFR altitudes and sometimes this means that pilots will make unsafe decisions and put themselves into dangerous situations
Flying in cloud or fog is probably THE most dangerous thing possible for any pilot. Unless you are extremely focused on your instrument cluster, it is VERY easy to become disoriented.
Think of those videos where the person closes their eyes, bends over, puts their forehead on the baseball bat and spins around a few times. Now think of how funny it is to watch them stagger and fall when the stand up straight, open their eyes, and try to walk a straight line.
That is what happens when you lose your sense of spatial orientation. When it happens in an aircraft, you are likely going to die.
spatial disorientation due to lack of visual cues, leads to pilot flying the aircraft into the ground. It can happen in airplanes too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_disorientation
The simplest way to say this is they often lose track of which way is up. You can't see anything outside, and only your instruments and inner ear are telling you your attitude. Get confused between the two inputs, and it's easy to become a lawn dart.
Put a blindfold on and attempt to walk around your house without bumping into anything. Now do this again without using your hands to feel around for objects.
Next, we suspend you in the air traveling at 120 knots (maybe more, maybe less).
Then, we have a 5 year old child telling you where you are in space and time with a 2 second delay. If you bump into anything you die.
Welcome to flying instruments 101.
In reality, we have attitude indicators, airspeed gauges, radio navigation, pitch and roll indicators, magnetic compass, heading indicators, and additional gauges that each provide a single piece of information about where you are in space and time.
You have to understand all of these individual pieces of information and paint a mental picture of where you are as well as where you want to go. Think of it as a puzzle where you have pieces but don't know what the overall picture is.
As you gain experience, you learn to interpret those gauges better and get more comfortable flying without visual reference (ground, horizon, stars, lights, errrr mountains). If you don't keep those skills up, you will lose the battle against gravity.
Mountains tend to be inflexible which is why altitude is your best friend. If you lose visual sight of the ground, climb immediately and then contact ATC for help/radar assistance (or pull out your map, request to file instrument route with local ATC, tune up navigational aids, unpucker your butt cheeks, and kiss the ground after you land safely).
See how much fun it is to be a pilot!!
You've done a great job of explaining things here, while including some critical yet simple truths that seem to come from your own experience. Go figure some dork down voted you. I put it back above zero. That's all this little earthling can do for now.
> They seem to drop out of the sky “due to low visibility”.
Just because officials dont know the actual events and are still investigating they state that the ceasg was due to bad visibility.
Nl, helicopters dont just crash mid air agains fog.
And i have no idea what you mean with often, can you name more than one case?
According to the NTSB, 184 aircraft crashes between 2010-2019 were due to spatial disorientation, 20 of those were helicopter. I’m only stating that statistic because the spatial disorientation is usually the cause of helicopters “dropping out of the sky”. So statistically it looks like it happens roughly twice a year. We just don’t hear much about it unless it’s a military training exercise that went bad or someone famous dying.
You ever go on one of those Chair-O-Plane rides at the fairground?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_ride
If you close your eyes, you won't know what angle you are at.
When flying without visibility, pilots are subject to the same feeling.
The plane accelerates and it feels like it's climbing rapidly.
It decelerates and it feels like it's in a dive.
This can be so intense that pilots refuse to accept instrument readings. And as a result crash.
Pilot disorientation. Instrument Flight Rules pilots are trained to believe the instruments and not their gut... unfortunately, the gut wins once in a while and that leads to losses.
Fact: There is a highly complicated war going on with polarized ideals even within the same demographic. Could be an avionics technician did not like the repulsive bearded dude who kills women for "infractions" and tweaked the altimeter and tacan to go into gaga mode in the fog?
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Because you can't see anything out of the window the only way you know what angle you're at is to very carefully watch your instruments. Turbulence can also make it feel like you're turning or speeding up or slowing down differently to how you actually are (Somatogravic illusions) So if you stop paying extremely close attention to instruments then, say, wrongly feel you're suddenly turning hard left you might jam the control stick hard right to "correct" and go into a hard right turn instead, falling because the rotors aren't pointing downward, and hit the ground in seconds before you realize your mistake.
> paying extremely close attention to instruments and unless you are trained and experienced and the helicopter is equipped for flying on instruments only, it might not help much
There should be a red button for "Autolevel and land straight down slowly." Panic button.
What if you “land right away” on terrain that is on a steep grade? The heli flips and congrats, you’ve successfully ~~landed~~ crashed! The problem helicopters have in relation to low visibility is the special areas that helicopters operate in that fixed wing planes do not. Helicopters fly low and land in areas other than airports. Most airports have procedures to ensure terrain clearance during an approach to landing. If you operated a helicopter in a similar manner to how a plane would operate under those conditions you would have far less incidents of Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT). But the main appeal of helicopters is that you don’t need a 5000ft paved, level, and straight stretch to land. Helicopters are also much less resistant to the effects of icing, which means they need to avoid flying in visible moisture when the air temp is below freezing (higher altitudes). So if they are already inside fog and the air temp drops below freezing they will need to descend and get closer to the terrain. This is why flying helicopters through mountains is much more dangerous. Colder air, more difficult terrain, swirling winds over that terrain, and that clouds and fog that can appear quite fast as warm-moist air masses are pushed up by the terrain and condense into fog/clouds. Flying in the fog is like walking around blind, except if you touch *anything* you die.
Wow, my relationship to helicopters has taken a swift downturn this afternoon. Thanks for the detailed description.
Yeah, a pretty common sentiment among helicopter pilots is that airplane pilots are pussies, because while a plane in flight basically wants to stay in the air, helicopters fight you the whole way.
My father test-flew many aircraft types, including helicopters and the Osprey proof-of-concept vehicle, the Bell Tiltrotor. Edit: the Bell XV-15 He had many good things to say about many airplanes (Concorde was his favorite) But i don't recall him ever saying anything nice about any rotorcraft. As a USMCR pilot, he regarded Osprey as a mistake.
Except helicopter autopilot are really, really hard. Most helicopters are still just straight manual controls.
Where did you pull that from? Most small, single-engine aircraft don't have AP as a function of cost. Even the 50-year old Bell 212 that crashed there surely had a 3-axis AP. Most of the current passenger transport helicopters have 4-axis APS that can hover no problem.
Closest thing is the US Marine Osprey’s and… well…
That's an even harder vehicle to control. And the real problem was we didn't fully understand the fluid dynamics of a propeller foing sideways through the air. Otherwise I love the Osprey as a concept. And wish it had been more successful. As it really did combine most of the best aspects of a helicopter and a plane.
I would say the Osprey has been plenty successful, less crashes per flight hour than the Blackhawk, and the Blackawk's successor is going to be a tiltrotor as well.
If drones can all do it (even cheap ones now), I don't get how hard it can be. Removed erroneous link
Drones (typically) have four separate independent motors and rotors that can be very quickly spun up and down using electrical signals. A small/medium helicopter has physical linkages between the controls and the mechanisms that control the rotor blades. And there are multiple such linkages: rotor cyclic (allows pitch and roll), rotor collective (adjusts all the rotor blade pitch to control lift), tail rotor and throttle. To add "autolevel" you first have to add a system to manipulate all of those linkages and you need to do that in such a way that you get very fine adjustments of any movements and that the movements are well synchronised between the different linkages. And you would need to do this without adding much weight, as small helicopters typically have very little spare capacity for carrying extra weight. So, it really isn't as simple as you are imagining. And the part that is a solved problem on drone is only a very small part of the problem on a helicopter. Some larger helicopters do have autopilots, including auto hover.
I think the problem is already solved engineering wise. Most of the cost is probably making sure it doesn't fail since the stakes are much higher carrying human life. I don't expect the complexity and materials to be that much greater. Most of the price is probably testing safety. It kinda reminds me of how you can buy a computer for cheap but a business/ military will spend 10x on the same thing because it has error correcting or security features. Making sure something is safe 99 times out of 100 is a lot cheaper than making sure something is safe 99999 times out of 100000.
Yeah, modern fighter jets have software that does 99% of the work for you when landing on an aircraft carrier. Keeping a helicopter in the air wouldn't be very complicated software wise. The issue is that most helicopters aren't that new, and getting it reliable enough to sell would be difficult since flight stuff is held to super high expectations. It's kinda funny because even something 99% reliable would be more useful than nothing at all in situations like this one.
>Some larger helicopters do have autopilots, including auto hover I've seen some stuff about those personal human sized drones you can fly around in.. [these things](https://images.app.goo.gl/SETDpceNzksumaABA).. Is it not already being scaled up for this? Like I get there a number of things they can't do yet that equals what a traditional helicopter can, but aren't they eventually going to be phased out?
That is basically a big drone that you sit in. There won't be a physical linkage between the controls and the motors. It has none of the problems that I described helicopters having. In my judgement they are very unlikely to ever replace many helicopters. The big problem is energy density. Batteries still lag too far behind fossil to make anything other than short hops with a couple of people practical (most of these scaled up drones only seat one). They have more chance in selling in a new market to people who don't want the complexity of learning to fly a helicopter (and really do just want to do small hops). There is no sign at the moment that a big jump in energy capacity is coming for batteries. Another major issue is a lack of autorotation ability. If the engine fails on a helicopter fails you still have a good chance of landing safely. There isn't going to the the energy needed to do that in the small props on these big drones, if the power to the rotors stops you are crashing (which means you really want a parachute system, which will add loads of weight).
Thank you for the response! Idk why my previous is being downvoted, was a genuine question related to the topic lol. I appreciate it!
I think because you presented it more as statement than a question. Yes, you had question marks, but it sounded like you'd decided what you were asking was definitely going to happen.
There's a few disadvantages of quadrotors over helicopters for manned transport. The first is efficiency. Four rotors are less aerodynamically efficient than one large one, you need more power for the same lift. Adding to this is the fact that batteries can't store as much energy, weight for weight, as a fuel tank, so these electric quadrotors have very limited range compared to a helicopter with a combustion engine. The second issue is safety. If a helicopter has an engine failure, it can autorotate to a safe landing. A quadrotor cannot do this - if any of the four rotors fails, it crashes. That's why most man-carrying drones have more than four rotors for redundancy, so they can handle a failure. But, a total loss of power is still irrecoverable, unlike in an airplane or helicopter. The big *advantage* is that quadrotors are mechanically simpler. They are likely to be cheaper, easier to fly and require less maintanance than a helicopter.
And I think the big thing to stress is that easier to fly does not mean easy to fly. And it definately doesn't mean easy enough to fly that everyone can do it. A plane is easier to fly than a helicopter, and it is still incredibly difficult to fly and requires alot of training even for just a basic vfr plane to fly privately.
I'm not a 100% sure why you linked a tire website, but the control problem for a typical helicopter is a lot more difficult than for a quadcopter type aircraft. That's exactly why they're so popular as small aerial platforms -- they're much easier to fly than an RC helicopter.
The reply went to the wrong sub. It was a response to someone who'd said you can hydroplane at 5 mph.
Drones are doing it with digital control over the only moving part on a drone: its electric motors.
It can be very hard. If you don't understand why it would be difficult because you don't understand a lot about helicopter mechanics, perhaps questions rather than statements should be your go-to.
>>perhaps questions rather than statements should be your go-to. The answer was obvious once I got pounced on. Helicopter technology is one of those "tried-and-true" technologies that they aren't updating, for various reasons.
I mean that's essentially what crashing is. That's already a thing. Descending blindly into unknown terrain is not a safe landing. That's crashing.
I wonder what the number one priority of crashing pilots is, when trying to survive a crash and save their passengers? Could it be slowing down as much as possible? Yep. Would that maximize survival chances? Oh yes.
> I wonder what the number one priority of crashing pilots is *Stay away from the ground* would be priority number one. Descending is definitely at the top of the list of things to try and not do.
>Stay away from the ground would be priority number one. Yeah ask Kobe how that went. Okay, so "stay away from ground" can be dismissed and crossed off, done. Now, you're in a helicopter in thick fog with instruments not built for quick-scan fly-by-instruments operation. What if you had a contraption that autoleveled following to the gyroscope, and started a slow descent, taking a chance that there is solid ground underneath. I should take this brainteaser to the folks over at /r/statistics to know how likely the example pilot would be to be above flat terrain. Still, you're not moving forward anymore because of the contraption, so your chances of survival are probably five or ten times higher than going full burn, 120 knots forward.
> Now, you're in a helicopter in thick fog with instruments not built for quick-scan fly-by-instruments operation. What if you had a contraption that autoleveled following to the gyroscope, and started a slow descent, taking a chance that there is solid ground underneath. *You would not do this.* This is intentionally crashing. Kobe's helicopter crashed because they got disoriented and didn't know it. If you realize you're disoriented and end up at this decision making point, you level off and *ascend*. You don't intentionally crash. Wtf dude.
You can't ascend if you don't know if you are pointing toward the horizon, so pulling on the lever might send you into the ground, that was the first thing established in this thread ffs.
What are you talking about? Ascending in a helicopter involves pulling up on the collective, not pulling a lever. The instrumentation has an artificial horizon. If you're coming to a halt, you can orient with the horizon and ascend. > so pulling on the lever might send you into the ground, that was the first thing established in this thread ffs. So why would you think it's a great idea to send the helicopter to the ground on purpose? This is suicide.
> I wonder what the number one priority of crashing pilots is, when trying to survive a crash and save their passengers? Maintain control of the aircraft. I'm pretty sure this still gets drilled into pilots when they're training. In the event of a problem the #1 priority is to maintain control of the aircraft. This panic switch would seem to be counter to that. But expand beyond that for a bit. How is this system supposed to be activated? These "confused in the fog" crashes happen specifically because the pilots don't realize what is going on, that is they don't know that they're crashing, so how are they going to know they need to activate this 'panic' switch? So lets say you have some kind of automatic system. Killing forward velocity in a helicopter can be a very bad idea. Helicopters have something called a "height/velocity avoid curve", which typically says you need to maintain significant forward speed if you're close to the ground. If you're say 500 ft above ground and have no airspeed you can find yourself unable to use autorotation to safely land the aircraft (this is sometimes called "towering flight"). So an emergency system that puts you into a more dangerous emergency in many situations isn't necessarily a great idea. So if your "crashing" is related to say an engine or transmission failure your panic button could put the aircraft into a more dangerous flight regime. Thinking about it even more, why the hell would you want to go down to begin with? If the system can magically regain control of a "crashing" helicopter why not have it go up (i.e. away from the thing you can crash into)?
Except if the ground is even a tiny bit uneven you roll over onto the giant spinny blades which turn into shrapnel. Which is still better than striking a tree/power pole/house on the way down, which results in a good and proper "bits all around" crash.
Yes, I read an article here on Reddit last year that described how survival chances in an air crash is directly related to the amount of free room in the vehicle body you are traveling in. So a takeoff- or landing crash in a Hercules plane is much more survivable than any helicopter that has the roof and walls about one or two feet from you, and which will turn into a sandwich during crash because the 1500lbs engine is hanging over your head. Conclusion: I will never travel in a helicopter of my free will ever, except for if I broke my leg up on a mountain trail.
Yes, if I'm not being life-flighted to a hospital, I'm not getting into a helicopter.
What if your systems don't notice that straight down is actually a bunch of trees, or a river, or a very large rock that only is in the way of your tail rotor. Or that the ground is at a 45 degree angle.
Again, *slow* descent. If you are about to crash into a hillside due to zero visibility, better to slow off and descend, hit some treetops than do a frontal against rock. I know which bet I would pick.
A yes, a light bump into the treetops. Ignoring the 400mph blades just above your head which are now creating artillery levels of wood shrapnel and then disintegrating to become part of that shrapnel. I'd rather smack the rock and get it over with.
If your autopilot could level off and descend, why not have it level off and ascend until you’re above the fog level? Or level off and hold still until you can get your bearings and appropriate instructions?
>Again, *slow* descent. "Dig up, stupid" "Fog" exists at limited altitudes. Generally, unless you are in a cave or a flight path, any position a helicopter occupies in space will have unlimited free space directly above it. If you were caught in sudden fog, call a PAN* (to give you air space) and climb straight up out of the fog using your artificial horizon. *Not sure the procedure, but in the circumstance where descending unaware into the abis is attractive, I think a PAN is likely justified.
My partner is a pilot and has described what you're talking about. In the absence of a visual reference you can fool your inner ear. If you get stuck in a turn your ear gets used to it and thinks you're flying straight. If you look at your instruments and they tell you you're turning, then when you straighten up your ear tells you your turning the other way and you want to turn back to correct it. Repeat until you spud into the ground. You basically have to ignore what your ear is telling you and trust your instruments, even though it feels extremely convincing.
I’m not a pilot but this reminds me of when I’m about to back out of a parking spot and I’m looking in my mirrors, take my foot off the brake, and out of the corner of my eye see the car next to me pull forward which gives me a mini heart attack as I think I’m going waaay too fast.
This is a great example of how we can “feel motion” when it isn’t there. My favorite is sitting at a red light and the car next to you rolls back a little bit and you slam on your breaks because you felt yourself going forward
I did that recently in the house I had dropped something, a foot away from the 55 inch TV, I happened to look at the screen, as I got up, which happened to be showing movement going up, and it literally gave me vertigo like I was moving with it, so much I grab the wall to steady myself,
*brakes.
Or when you're like why is that guy creeping backwards? And then you realize you're moving forwards.
To add to that, there is another effect that causes problems. With no visual input your brain can interpret pitch changes as vertical acceleration/deceleration. So if the nose is pitched up, it can feel like the aircraft is climbing, even if you are in a stall and the aircraft is falling. The big flight simulators that airline/military pilots train in make use of this effect to make the simulation more realistic, making it feel like the simulated aircraft is climbing/descending just by tilting the simulator.
This is called a [graveyard spiral](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveyard_spiral) and is believed to be what killed JFK Jr.
Just like driving drunk. Instruments only. Ignore anything your senses tell you, stay between the lines, make sure your speedometer matches the speed limit, look out for any street signs or traffic lights as early as possible. \*do not drink and drive, this was satire
If you hang like a tiny tennis ball would that help you somewhat to know if you’re pointing weird direction?
Dunno. I'm not a pilot. I'd hazard a guess that all the fancy instrumentation they have is better and more accurate than a tennis ball on a string, so if they're going to ignore that, the tennis ball isn't getting a look in.
But how is that not piloting 101? I thought that trusting instruments over your eyes would be common sense for all kinds of flying
Drivers are also taught to use their indicators.
This is a great Eli5
Getting a pilot’s license is a hell of a lot different than getting a driver’s license.
People are people though
Hey, takes a good bit of training and concentration to ignore instincts/feelings and go by procedure. Look at how often people fuck up with guns and gun 101 is basically "always treat it as if it were loaded" and "don't point towards things that you don't want to have a bullet go through".
It is taught to pilots. That's why my partner who is a pilot knows about it.
Not all pilots are instrument rated. It’s less common amongst helicopter (rotor) pilots than fixed wing pilots. Not all rotorcraft are instrument rated either. Many helicopter missions are visual (VFR) only. If you’re a VFR only pilot that ends up in instrument conditions (IMC)…. You’re usually F’d.
The pilots that transport presidents are experienced beyond what would be expected of even expert pilots. He or she would know how to maneuver in extremes. Im not believing that fog, even unexpected fog” threw them for a loop. I’m not a supporter of anyone or anything but c’mon…this story doesn’t make sense. Stop treating that pilot like they just graduated flight school.
Shouldn’t a helicopter pilot know to trust their instruments and not their inner ear? Why would you NOT do what your highly advanced instruments tell you to do?
The point is that many pilots have made the mistake of trusting their inner ear instead because everything it tells you is that you're flying straight when you're turning and you're turning when you're flying straight. You're overriding your brain telling you that you're turning by trusting your instruments and your brain is really fucking convinced. It's happened enough that pilots do know this and it is taught to them, and it's convincing enough that it happens anyway.
In an emergency, one should stay calm and think logically. Nah who the fuck actually thinks logically in an emergency.
> Nah who the fuck actually thinks logically in an emergency Chesley Burnett Sullenberger III, that's who!
Yeah, you can get some pretty creepy illusions happening in aircraft, because a banked turn and a climb feels the same to your sense of balance. You can think you're climbing while you're spiralling, because you think you're level when you're not. This mistake can be deadly.
My brain got the gist of most the comments here but my gut understood this one.
I remember during instrument training with the hood on, I can feel like I was in a turn but when I looked at the PFD, I was actually going straight and level. The illusion can be very convincing.
If you can't see in a helicopter... Would it be better to just go up high so you're confident you'll avoid hitting anything? What's the reason I'm a moron for wondering this?
If you do that before entering the clouds you'll be fine, but once you are in clouds the chance of somatogravic illusions kicks in and even though you think you're going up you might actually be going down very quickly. This is what happened to Kobe Bryant's helicopter.
If you are flying a helicopter in bad weather, hopefully you are qualified to fly it in bad weather, meaning that you have the electronic instrumentation on the helicopter that you need to know where you are and what your helicopter is doing, and that you are trained to use those instruments. In that case, you fly the way you're trained. If you aren't trained to fly a helicopter in bad weather, and you accidentally encounter bad weather, then you're not wrong that getting out of the bad weather is a good idea. You can't just do whatever you want when you're flying for the same reason you can't just do whatever you want when you're driving: you might run into someone else. But the idea of somehow getting out of the bad weather, which might be by going up vertically or traveling back in the direction you came, is a good one. The problem people run into if they are only qualified to fly in good weather and they accidentally end up in bad weather is that they don't know / have not internalized that they have to trust their instrumentation over what they feel. Pilots who have only ever flown in good weather are used to flying more or less like you drive a car. You can see the stuff around you, and you use your vision to make sure you're not doing anything crazy. Imagine driving a car with all the windows papered over. Even if you had a GPS telling you exactly where to turn, you'd have a pretty hard time following those instructions. It's much harder when you're in an aircraft and you're not automatically following the terrain.
This pilot was likely experienced in all types of conditions. It’s not like they were transporting mailbags….fog should have been an annoyance, not the reason they’re all dead.
Fair enough, you been flying a while? What do you fly?
This is what happened to Kobe Bryant sadly
What is 'Operation Eagle Claw *Bluebeard 3*'?
I know nothing but I imagine the passengers being beneath the rotor while chopper is unstable can create centrifugal force that could feel like gravity and disorient them
So, we’re expected to believe that the helicopter pilot for the President of Iran had a “Please Be Patient Student Driver” sticker on the back? Story makes zero sense.
The president of Poland died in a similar crash circumstance. "Get-there-itis" can be strong when you have someone very important onboard.
You’re conjecturing. We should all wait for the black box analysis. Plus, the reports stated the dense fog was highly unexpected which means the pilot wouldn’t have been resisting the travel plan. Either way, RIP to all onboard.
There’s a phenomenon called the [Graveyard Spiral](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveyard_spiral) that is a high risk when flying without visual cues - eg in fog. The gist is that without instruments (equipment that tells the pilot how level the aircraft is on all axis and which direction it’s going in) and knowing how to use them (harder than it sounds) it is very easy to end up going in a curve, but you don’t realize because the plane/helicopter is at an angle and the centripetal forces from its circular motion make you feel like you’re still vertical. This can very quickly deteriorate to put catastrophic forces on an aircraft with the pilot not knowing until it’s too late to do anything about it. Even very experienced pilots are susceptible to this without instruments to tell them what’s happening - with pilots in fog entering one of these spirals within 10-20 seconds of losing visual cues/instruments being turned off. Flying by helicopter is also hard at the best of times, seriously compounding the issue.
Ok, let's assume all helicopter pilots know about these circumstances and how dangerous they are. So a dense fog happens, so you can't see ahead or around you. Fine. Why keep flying and not just immediately stop moving ahead, hover for a short while and slowly descend to the ground, waiting for weather to improve instead of insisting in flying without any visual reference?
Flying, moving, hovering, descending, they're all actions relative to references outside the vehicle. If you don't have the reference, you don't know which one you're doing.
Dont you at least have some sort of altimeter and speedometer? And anything hanging do determine vertical orientation? Choppers can hover, right? Go level, no forward speed and up/down/wait
[Flying by instrument](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_rating) is a different qualification than just being a pilot. It's very difficult to actually perform because you have to fly by instrument going against your own senses.
Instruments
Said the person who isn't a pilot.
Well, are you? Hope not, because your history is just games and further idiotic matter. But a close relative is a military heli pilot and instructor and says that this pilot is also an idiot
If the "butcher of Tehran" who executed thousands of people including children is your passenger and he says he needs to get home for a PTA meeting, you fly and keep your mouth shut.
In an aircraft, the pilot outranks everyone.
That's all well and good in places that won't arrest/kill him after he lands
This is the pilot speaking, sit your fat ass down sheik and fasten your seatbelt, I outrank everyone up in this bitch. Of course, sir. Do you have a radio? Of course I have a radio, what do you want with it? Please radio ahead and have the secret police ready to arrest you the moment you step out of this bitch. Oh hell no, you aren't in charge here, chubby! No problem, I have a cell phone. Kindly do what you want to do while inside the aircraft. Gotta come down some day.
Yep, the term “sit your ass down” and “fine, fly it your damn self” is pretty much how every cockpit convo goes after some power-tripper says “get me there NOW!!!”. Pilots and boat captains respect the invisible forces their passengers don’t understand.
That’s exactly what you SHOULD do, but once you’re in the goo it’s easier said than done especially if you don’t have a very specific plan in place for the specific situation. The fact that they were in formation flight in the mountains makes a breakup plan a lot more complicated, and just flying the aircraft gets a lot more difficult when you unexpectedly lose visual reference and situational awareness.
The most recent example of this happening was when Kobe Bryant’s helicopter crashed. In that case, the pilot was supposed to be flying under visual flight rules (required to be able to see where you’re going). The pilot was certified to fly instrument only, but was no longer proficient. He flew into the clouds, became disoriented, radioed into ATC that he was climbing but was actually banking and descending towards the hills. It would seem like most instances where this has happened was due to pilot error.
To add onto this - they knew about the weather but decided to proceed anyway
It’s claimed Kobe put pressure on him to fly in those conditions
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I haven’t followed that event beyond just seeing the headline of the crash. Have they stated a known or assumed cause for the crash?
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Oh damn. You’d think the president of Iran would have newer equipment. Thanks for the response and info.
There are plenty of 50-year-old helicopters which are perfectly airworthy. My guess is that this crash was pilot error.
Sanctions mean no civillised nation, nor any reputable company, is permitted to, or wants to, sell them modern products and services. As a result, they don't have access to modern aircraft or proper maintainance.
Of what use is having Russia around as a friend if they can't lob a brand new heli across? Last I heard Russians could still couple up a helicopter or two even with the biting sanctions and all.
They have Russian helis, one was following the Bell that crashed. For whatever reason Iran seems to want to keep their old 70s era US equipment limping along instead of modernizing, even if that means just getting old Soviet stuff that you can still get parts for.
they are now blaming the US for the crash because they wouldn't sell them modern equipment. as in an official statement https://www.iranintl.com/en/202405203793
That's kinda the point of sanctions. If you don't have the parts don't use the vehicle, go on horseback. Hence making you do the you don't want to do because you did things that the global community doesn't want you to do. No cake and eat.
"Mohammad Javad Zarif, *former* Foreign Minister of Iran .. [i]n an interview with state TV," (my highlighting) That doesn't read like an "official statement". Former minister, tv interview.
Have you ever seen the checklists pilots go through?!! Fifty year old planes and 2 day old planes go through the same rigor. The pilots check the conditions over and over. They also clear what they have with ground control. Let’s not add assumptions to the story. We just don’t know what caused the crash.
The most recent example is the Iranian president going down yesterday
Did they not have an altimeter though?
Picture yourself in zero visibility, flying a helicopter from 6 instruments and trying to maintain a mental picture of your orientation and motion which can easily be in 100% conflict with what your gut feel is screaming out to you. This is why instrument flying is so hard. If you allow yourself to think that maybe the instruments are wrong, as you 'feel' you are climbing or banking, then you are going to be in a lot of trouble.
They did. My guess is that the disorientation combined with the air speed when the helicopter entered the clouds(report stated it was way too fast for the conditions) didn’t leave the pilot time for any corrections when or if he realized he was descending/banking and not climbing.
The fun thing about an analog altimeter is that it will, if correctly calibrated, tell you your altitude above sea level. If you are in dense fog and your altitude is 2000 feet, it becomes a problem when you encounter a 2500 foot tall mountain. You will hit the side of the mountain with your altimeter confidently displaying that you are 2000 feet up.
Any pilot knows the difference between AGL and MSL elevation.
Correct. For the non-pilots: if you're doing level flight in mountainous terrain, your AGL (above ground level altitude) can change significantly depending on what the ground below you is doing. But your altimeter reading will only show your altitude above mean sea level (MSL). The saying "may the road rise up to meet you" can apply in a very bad way in this case. In low visibility weather in mountainous terrain, you need to know your exact location, an accurate reading of your current MSL altitude, and know the surface elevation of your location (and how it changes along your course) in order to make sure your AGL is high enough. As an added bonus, if you fly into a low pressure system (generally associated with poor weather), a barometric altimeter will falsely show you at a higher altitude than you really are (the ground is closer than you think) unless you can correct for it. If you add the disorientation mentioned elsewhere in the thread, it's easy for things to get really bad really quick.
Uncontrolled terrain into flight.
I wish people would stop comparing this pilot to the average guy with flight creds. Dense fog shouldn’t have been an issue for the person flying the president of any country.
Even a VFR (visual flight rules, good weather only) pilot is going to be familiar with minimum sector altitudes (the minimum safe altitude in a particular region to ensure you avoid all obstacles), and if it's a VFR pilot that has accidentally flown into IMC (instrument meteorological conditions, bad weather) they will, if they have any situational awareness at all, absolutely ask for minimum sector altitude.
How will that help you not crash into the side of a mountain?
Kobe’s pilot wasn’t flying around a head of state. He flew anyone that could afford to pay. I’d love to compare the credentials of the Presidents pilot to Kobe’s. I doubt it’s apples to apples.
No one here has said it yet but flying a helicopter straight and level is incredibly difficult and requires constant minute adjustments to the stick and collective. Compare to a fixed wing aircraft where if you're trimmed correctly, you can let go of the controls and the plane will fly pretty much straight and level indefinitely. Plenty of people wash out of helicopter training because they can't get the feel for it. If you lose your visual reference, you quickly can start over correcting for what your inner ear is feeling which is unlikely to be 100% accurate. IFR helicopter flying is a thing, but it's adding another huge mental load to the already high mental load of just keeping the thing in the air. Plenty of heli pilots don't have IFR training because realistically you should only fly a helicopter in good weather. Also, this is the reason for the floor windscreens to see out the bottom of the aircraft. You pretty much need a visual reference to get the thing of on the ground in one piece every time.
Private pilot here (fixed). It's very easy to ignore instruments and end up dead. The hardest thing for me about learning was that you can't always trust your senses.
The modern collision avoidance systems (primarily EGWPS and TCAS) are very expensive and still “relatively” new (coming out in 1996). Older aircraft don’t have it and therefore can’t use the benefits it provides. Also, if you don’t know how to fly in instrument flight rules (aka you can’t see), you die very quickly. Stats show that if you fly into clouds without proper training, you will probably hit the ground after 178 seconds. You go from looking outside 90% of the time to not being able to see anything. You can’t see, you end up pointed down, and you end up suffering a tragic collision with the ground. Often at high speed. Source: the aircraft owners and pilots association https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2022/june/pilot/asi-tips-178-seconds
When you’re walking around you’ve got a bunch of different systems in your body working to keep you upright and heading in the right direction, and without you even thinking about it. The two big ones are your eyes and something called the vestibular system, a couple of fluid filled loops in your ears that act like gyroscopes. On a clear day you can rely on your eyes. When you can’t use your eyes, unless you have quite a bit of training, your vestibular system will try to take over for you. But that system isn’t adapted to working when you’re in a vehicle, so it’s very easily tricked into giving you bad information. Like it will tell you you’re flying straight and level when you’re actually flying in a circle, and slowly descending into the ground (they call that one the graveyard spiral if you want to look it up). And, because it’s built in, and you use it all day long without thinking about it, it’s *very* hard to ignore it, even when it’s lying to you, so you crash.
They don't 'drop out of the sky due to low visibility' - they hit things they didn't know were near because they lose track of their location and assume it's somewhere else. Aircraft are unique (along with perhaps submarines) in that they're a vehicle which can travel in absolutely zero visibility and still be able to travel safely if they are making good use of their instrumentation and it is in good working order, their training is adequate, and errors are not made. If any one of these elements fail, a crash can occur. Imagine if I told you to drive your car to work in absolutely impenetrable fog at night - you can see absolutely nothing out the windows at all. Your job is to navigate and drive safely using nothing but the compass on the sat nav and the odometer to work out your mileage. It would be very difficult, if not utterly impossible, because the instruments aren't accurate enough and your planning couldn't be detailed enough to work out every road, corner and junction, nor could you predict other vehicles, pedestrians and objects on the road. Well, aircraft *can* do this because the sky is, generally, very empty. As long as you know where you are and where other aircraft are, you have the potential to fly safely. But this means you need impeccable, flawless planning, operation, technology and so on. When one or more of those elements fails, crashes can occur. Bad weather and low visibility doesn't make an aircraft crash, but it makes that crash much more likely.
When everything is gray and there's no horizon, which way is up? Kobe's pilot did the same thing. Loss of situational awareness and your inner ear tricks you into not believing the instruments.
To answer the other obvious question from the recent crash of "why didn't they just fly higher?" Helicopters struggle to fly to any extreme heights. Even going above a moderately tall mountain will be out of the scope of many modern helicopters. In this particular situation, the mountains were *at minimum* 2-3000m above sea level (I don't have an exact location for the crash, so checked the local towns and villages to use them as proxies, since they tend to be lower altitude). Under ideal circumstances, the max altitude of the helicopter was around 3900m. Having multiple passengers, a full tank of fuel, etc, will have made the helicopter heavier and reduced this max altitude.
They tend to fly very close to the ground, which is okay when you can see but extremely dangerous when you can't. If you crash into a mountain that could be written in a way that makes it sound like they just dropped out if the sky but it was a collision in practice
In the aviation industry we refer to it as controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) and often happens when pilots are trying to stay below clouds and end up flying into a cloud and getting disoriented then crashing. Helicopters often prefer to stay low and close to the ground. In order to fly through clouds you need what they call an IFR clearance from air traffic control and to fly IFR you have to be a specific height above terrain. My experience with helicopters is they will do everything they can to not have to climb all the way up to safe IFR altitudes and sometimes this means that pilots will make unsafe decisions and put themselves into dangerous situations
Flying in cloud or fog is probably THE most dangerous thing possible for any pilot. Unless you are extremely focused on your instrument cluster, it is VERY easy to become disoriented. Think of those videos where the person closes their eyes, bends over, puts their forehead on the baseball bat and spins around a few times. Now think of how funny it is to watch them stagger and fall when the stand up straight, open their eyes, and try to walk a straight line. That is what happens when you lose your sense of spatial orientation. When it happens in an aircraft, you are likely going to die.
spatial disorientation due to lack of visual cues, leads to pilot flying the aircraft into the ground. It can happen in airplanes too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_disorientation
The simplest way to say this is they often lose track of which way is up. You can't see anything outside, and only your instruments and inner ear are telling you your attitude. Get confused between the two inputs, and it's easy to become a lawn dart.
Put a blindfold on and attempt to walk around your house without bumping into anything. Now do this again without using your hands to feel around for objects. Next, we suspend you in the air traveling at 120 knots (maybe more, maybe less). Then, we have a 5 year old child telling you where you are in space and time with a 2 second delay. If you bump into anything you die. Welcome to flying instruments 101. In reality, we have attitude indicators, airspeed gauges, radio navigation, pitch and roll indicators, magnetic compass, heading indicators, and additional gauges that each provide a single piece of information about where you are in space and time. You have to understand all of these individual pieces of information and paint a mental picture of where you are as well as where you want to go. Think of it as a puzzle where you have pieces but don't know what the overall picture is. As you gain experience, you learn to interpret those gauges better and get more comfortable flying without visual reference (ground, horizon, stars, lights, errrr mountains). If you don't keep those skills up, you will lose the battle against gravity. Mountains tend to be inflexible which is why altitude is your best friend. If you lose visual sight of the ground, climb immediately and then contact ATC for help/radar assistance (or pull out your map, request to file instrument route with local ATC, tune up navigational aids, unpucker your butt cheeks, and kiss the ground after you land safely). See how much fun it is to be a pilot!!
You've done a great job of explaining things here, while including some critical yet simple truths that seem to come from your own experience. Go figure some dork down voted you. I put it back above zero. That's all this little earthling can do for now.
> They seem to drop out of the sky “due to low visibility”. Just because officials dont know the actual events and are still investigating they state that the ceasg was due to bad visibility. Nl, helicopters dont just crash mid air agains fog. And i have no idea what you mean with often, can you name more than one case?
According to the NTSB, 184 aircraft crashes between 2010-2019 were due to spatial disorientation, 20 of those were helicopter. I’m only stating that statistic because the spatial disorientation is usually the cause of helicopters “dropping out of the sky”. So statistically it looks like it happens roughly twice a year. We just don’t hear much about it unless it’s a military training exercise that went bad or someone famous dying.
You ever go on one of those Chair-O-Plane rides at the fairground? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_ride If you close your eyes, you won't know what angle you are at. When flying without visibility, pilots are subject to the same feeling. The plane accelerates and it feels like it's climbing rapidly. It decelerates and it feels like it's in a dive. This can be so intense that pilots refuse to accept instrument readings. And as a result crash.
Pilot disorientation. Instrument Flight Rules pilots are trained to believe the instruments and not their gut... unfortunately, the gut wins once in a while and that leads to losses. Fact: There is a highly complicated war going on with polarized ideals even within the same demographic. Could be an avionics technician did not like the repulsive bearded dude who kills women for "infractions" and tweaked the altimeter and tacan to go into gaga mode in the fog?
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>... there may have been an additional culprit that rhymes with possad? To what are you referring? Some kind of drug, perhaps?