The owner was the pilot flying, as he apparently had been throughout the trip. His plan was to leave the safety pilot in Wasilla before flying the last 60 miles home to Anchorage. After clearing the mountains west of Juneau, the heli- copter descended to 500 to 700 feet, heading northwest along the coastline. As it crossed Glacier Bay National Park about 60 miles northwest of Gustavus, the pilot asked the others whether they’d like to land on a beach to stretch their legs. A minute later, the safety pilot pointed out a long stretch of beach to their right, and the pilot began a right turn. The safety pilot’s hands were off the controls, and his feet were on the floor. The pilot then twisted the throttle from the Flight to the Idle position and lowered collective slightly. Rotor rpm decayed into the gauge’s yellow cautionary range within 5 seconds.
It’s natural for the instructor to believe the client knows the aircraft, while the client simultaneously trusts the instructor to keep them both out of trouble. The result can be a dangerous vacuum of authority.
Seven seconds after reducing power, the pilot
reached for the center console to mute the low-rpm warning horn. Rotor rpm continued decreasing to its recorded low of 254 rpm, and 18 seconds after the initial power reduction the helicopter crashed into Lituya Bay. All four occupants were thrown from the wreckage.
The elder son regained consciousness in the water and managed to make it to shore. He was eventually res- cued by the US Coast Guard and hospitalized in Anchorage. The safety pilot’s body washed ashore about three-quarters of a mile from the accident site. The bod- ies of the pilot and his younger son weren’t recovered.
The Pilots The aircraft owner–pilot had more than 1,000 hours of fixed-wing experience. He’d logged 59 hours in the Robinson R44 while earning his helicopter rating. On Jun. 4, 2018, he completed the factory AS350 B3e tran- sition course with 3 hours of dual instruction in the air- craft and 1 hour of simulator time. He got another 1.5 hours of dual at the factory on Aug. 5, giving him a total of 4.5 flight hours in the accident make and model. Over the summer, he flew 18.3 hours in an AS350 B2 oper- ated by the safety pilot’s company. The safety pilot’s widow told investigators that the owner–pilot’s skills impressed her husband and their
62 ROTOR 2020 Q4
company’s check airman: both considered him “a really good stick.” By the day of the accident, the owner–pilot had accumulated an estimated 103.8 hours of helicopter time. The safety pilot held a commercial certificate with single-engine land, multiengine land, single-engine sea, and helicopter ratings, but he wasn’t a flight instructor. Of his estimated 15,350 flight hours, 4,350 had been flown in the AS350 series. His company flew no B3 models, however, and during an interview with investiga- tors, the surviving son said his father seemed much more familiar with the details of this model than did the safety pilot.
The Aircraft The 2018 model helicopter had flown just 13.7 hours when delivered and about 40 hours by the time it crashed. It was equipped with a Genesys Aerosystems HeliSAS autopilot and stability augmentation system and an Appareo Vision 1000 cockpit image recorder that cap- tured four frames per second. The FADEC (full authority digital engine control) system and the associated event data recorder (EDR) of the 952–shaft horsepower Safran Arriel 2D turboshaft engine recorded engine parameters and failure flags at 1-second intervals. Normal procedure in the AS350 B3e is to twist the
throttle from Idle to Flight during run-up and leave it there until completing the postflight engine and rotor shutdown checklists. Moving to Idle in flight would be done in a practice autorotation, but the NTSB noted that the beach wasn’t an ideal landing zone for a full-down auto, and the survivor told investigators they hadn’t done any autorotations on the way up from Texas.
The Analysis By the time the investigators arrived, the wreckage of the fuselage had washed onto the beach and been par- tially covered by sand. More than 25 gallons of fuel were recovered on-site. Examination of the wreckage ruled out fuel contamination and showed no evidence of pre-impact failure of the engine, transmission, main rotor, or collective and cyclic controls. The tail boom and tail rotor were never recovered. In the last 16 seconds captured by the FADEC and EDR recordings, the twist grip went from Flight to Idle to Flight to Idle and back to Flight. All recorded parame- ters responded appropriately to those inputs. The Appareo recording captured not only images but also GPS coordinates and pitch, roll, yaw, and accelera- tion data. The last data stream showed that the helicop- ter was level at 618 feet and 116 knots, pitched
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