Short safety tip on helicopter vibrations by Kenny Keller. He warns pilots to land immediately and investigate any unusual vibrations rather than continuing to fly. He relates a personal incident from August 2005 when a main rotor system failure led to ground resonance; he was ejected, suffered a back injury, and later faced legal depositions. The core message: do not ignore vibrations—land, inspect, and consult the owner/mechanic.
Questions this video answers
August 2005
Chapters
Vibrations. If you're not sure what it is, land the helicopter, get it checked out. I have a picture here of this seat that I was flying from the 480 that I was in in August of 2005. We had a failure in the main rotor system, went into ground resonance, and I was ejected from the helicopter. Had a back injury, couldn't fly for a few months. That wasn't so bad. Got back flying again, wasn't too bad. The worst part was going through all the. Going to have to sit in front of attorneys and give depositions and kind of try to keep explaining how we didn't do anything wrong. We did what we were supposed to be doing. We had vibrations in this aircraft, and we chose to keep flying it. And we were reporting it, and they were looking at it and they were telling us, oh, well, it's just you guys. It's just your pilot technique. And we're, you know, scratching our heads going, pilot technique? What are they talking about? We're not causing this vibration. But we continued to fly it. That was our choice. You can't mess around with vibrations. If you get us some kind of a strange vibration that you start noticing, land the thing, get it on the ground, talk to the owner, talk to your mechanic, investigate and find out what it is. So I'm living proof on the whole vibration thing.
