AIR ACCIDENT INVESTIGATION UNIT, IRELAND
The main wreckage was located on the seabed southeast of Black Rock at a depth of approximately 40 m (131 ft.). The position of the wreck is indicated by the yellow arrow.
The accident aircraft’s tail pylon, including the tail-rotor assembly, was recovered from the seabed on Apr. 10.
western Ireland. In 2001, he earned his multi-engine and instrument ratings, S-61N type rating, and all-weather SAR qualifica- tion. He was upgraded to captain in December 2007 after assignment to the Dublin base and obtained his S-92A type rating in 2013. Of his 3,435 hours of flight experience, 795 had been flown in the S-92A, 695 of them as PIC. Both rear crew members held dual rat- ings as winch operators and winchmen, having gained their initial SAR experience in military service. The 53-year-old winch operator had begun his civilian career as a senior SAR crew member in 1998, while
62 ROTOR MARCH 2022
the 38-year-old winchman entered civilian service in 2004. Like the pilots, both com- pleted their S-92A transition training in 2013 during the operator’s fleet upgrade from the S-61N.
In addition to their scheduled flight- competency checks, all four crew mem- bers were up-to-date on six recurrent train- ing modules, including emergency and safety equipment, helicopter underwater egress, crew resource management, and fatigue risk management. The pilots had also completed recurrent training in con- trolled flight into terrain less than six months earlier.
The Aircraft The helicopter operated as Rescue 116 was manufactured in 2007 and registered in Ireland in 2013 as EI-ICR. It was equipped with a Rockwell Collins avionics suite that included five multifunction displays (MFDs); a Universal Navigation UNS-1 flight man- agement system (FMS) with GPS; a Honeywell Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System (EGPWS) modified for SAR flight profiles; a weather radar, also from Honeywell; a forward-looking infrared (FLIR) camera integrated with the optical camera and searchlight systems; two Honeywell AA-300 radar altimeters; and a Euroavionics EuroNav 5 moving map dis- play. A Zone 4 50-hour inspection had been carried out four days and three flight hours before the aircraft’s assignment to the top- cover flight. The FMS included a multimission man- agement system programmed with six search patterns and eight additional flight profiles (four descent/approach, three hover, and one departure). All could be modified by the pilots as the situation required. The operator’s standard procedure was to fly the helicopter coupled, with all mode selections, changes, or adjustments called out by one pilot and confirmed by the other. The FMS was also programmed with the operator’s proprietary low-altitude arrival routes to off-airport refueling sites and landing zones, many based on user- defined waypoints. These weren’t charted instrument approach procedures, but lateral course guidance for use in visual meteoro- logical conditions. Hard-copy documentation was provided in a series of three-ring binders in which overlays of the navigation waypoints on scans of standard aeronautic charts were matched with text descriptions of the head- ings and distances plus comments, if any. No vertical profiles were specified, though some comments did suggest minimum altitudes for individual segments. The aircraft’s progress along the route could be displayed on one of the MFDs
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