Kenny Keller (Coffee With Kenny, Day 270) reviews a video of two police helicopters whose main rotors struck each other during a landing evolution. He plays the clip, notes that one helicopter was parked slightly right of its intended box (per the accident report), and that spotty weather and rain droplets reduced visibility. The host emphasizes that the approaching pilot focused on her landing spot and did not notice the other helicopter's mispositioning; when she lowered collective the rotors contacted, causing catastrophic airframe damage but only minor injuries to personnel. Keller frames the event as human-error plus degraded situational awareness, and uses it to teach slow, smooth, methodical control and the need to track surrounding traffic. He also points viewers to the NTSB report and to paid HelicopterGround.com training resources.
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What do you think happens when you get two helicopters too close together with spinning rotor blades? We're gonna see here in just a minute, but first I gotta show you the back view or the whole view of the Hogs Wall of fame. We intro'd yesterday with a little time lapse of Heather going across and bringing the two walls together. So there you go. Helicopter online. Ground school Wall of fame. Frickin cool. All right. Day 270 Coffee with Kenny. I'm Kenny Keller, creator. Helicopter align ground school and we're gonna take a look at this devastation. Then we'll talk just a minute about it kind of a little bit behind the scenes. What happened. I'll put the link down below this video for the full video. And there's also a link down below for the NTSB report if you'd like to read the NTSB report about this accident. So let's take a look. Man, that's devastation. That is catastrophic. Luckily everybody just received minor injuries. So that's, that's the good thing. Right? So they've got their landing area over here and then they've got two boxes and they pull this helicopter out first. And it isn't put in the normal spot. It's supposed to be over the box and it gets put a little bit to the right. This is discussed in the accident report. Doesn't say exactly why they didn't put it in the box, but everybody admitted that it wasn't put in the proper spot. I do want to note that in the accident report they talk about how the weather was spotty off and on all day, back and forth, up, down, up down. So it's already a day where it's iffy. A lot of times we see a lot of crazy wild stuff beforehand. Right? But approach looks pretty good. Goes down to where they would normally land, approaches in stop, turn starts moving over. So at least it doesn't look totally freaky. I mean, you know, something bad is going to happen obviously because we've already seen it and because of the title of the video. But the pilot makes the turn, starts moving over. Okay, that all looks pretty good. And when this pilot goes to set it down on the spot, Boom. Contact with the rotor blades. Again, thankful everybody just had minor injuries. So that's good. But look at the devastation. And that's the thing about helicopters, you know, and I talk about this all the time, how they're such. They're so cool, right? And they're neat and we love them and they're so fun to see them fly. But man, with those rotating blades, main rotor and tail rotor, one little tiny mistake, a person just doesn't think for one second and this is the chaos that ensues. And I was reading that the pilot of this aircraft said she was trying to focus on her box and she didn't realize that this aircraft was not where it was supposed to be. And I also read, and I thought about this before I even read the accident report, the fact that she mentioned about rain droplets on the window and anyone, most anyone can understand that, yes, when you have moisture on the windshield of the aircraft and on your windows, it makes it a little bit harder to see. So the pilot was focusing on landing in her spot, didn't realize that aircraft, where it was supposed to be, comes down and when she lowers the collective almost to the ground, as you can see again, the approach looks good. Looks like she's being careful coming over. So human error, right? It just happens. Man, I am glad that they all ended up okay. So I guess the takeaway for today is it goes back to situational awareness and trying to keep track of everything around you and not counting on somebody else to do the right thing. Right? There's millions of bad things that can happen. And that's why in these videos the last few days or last week, I keep preaching slow, smooth, methodical. At least in this event, it looked good up until the moment when the rotor blades interacted and started destroying everything. Flipping crazy, man. So leave your Comments down below. Helicopterground.com right there. That link is down below the video and I'm also going to put it up here in the corner of the screen or whichever corner that is. We have four courses for our helicopter, land, ground school, private, commercial, CFI and instrument. You can take any of these courses for a 24 hour test flight with a monthly subscription. It's an easy way to go in and see exactly what we have. Not just a sample, you can see the whole entire course. So go check that out. Subscribe to the channel. When you do, click that little bell so you'll be notified of our daily video. This has gotten pretty fun the last couple weeks doing a lot of accident stuff. But it's just, you know, we learn from seeing, right? We spent so much time talking about it in theory that I just got on this kick of, you know, reviewing some of these and taking a look at them and trying to put these things fresh in our mind. So again, subscribe the channel, click the bell. Leave us a comment down below. Helicopterground.com it's in the description box. It's up here on one corner of the screen. Leave your comment down below and we'll see you in the next video. It.
