"do you think the recent Fatal Helicopter Crash will hurt the industry?"

In just a minute here, we're going to talk about rotor blades and rotor systems and why helicopters don't just drop out of the sky like a lot of people think that they do. I'm Kenny Keller, creator of Helicopter Line Ground School, and I want to talk tonight about helicopters and the safety of helicopters. And I don't want you or any viewer to get the wrong impression due to the recent celebrity fatal accident that happened in a very short amount of time. There has been so much information thrown out there. The NTSB has released a preliminary report, but all that report has is a lot of the factual information about the aircraft, about the pilot, pilot hours, the crash site. But it by no means is giving an actual cause to the accident. Now it's hinting towards some things and things could change over time. Right? And my daughter brought up something tonight that I thought, you know, this is a great content for a video. We went and had supper and I wanted to come back and do some stuff at the airport tonight. And I was thinking about what she said to me. And she said, dad, do you think that this recent crash is going to hurt the helicopter industry? And I said, no, I don't think so, Gloria, I don't think it is. And she said, well, but there's so many negative things being said. And I said, well, as tragic as it is, it does bring attention to a problem we already have in the industry, which is pilots flying into bad weather. So regardless of whether that's we find that's the actual cause. In the end, guessing we'll find out as a contributing factor because anybody that wants to start reading can learn and see that the weather was not good that day. Now, is that the only factor? Probably not, because every single accident has what we call a bad judgment chain, right, where you have a series of events, one stacked on top of another, stacked on top of another, stacked on top of another, and in the end causes the accident. So what was a pilot doing the night before? How much rest did a pilot have? What was going on in a pilot's mind that day? What's going on with maintenance of an aircraft? There's millions of scenarios on why helicopters crash and why bad things happen. So anyway, back to my daughter's story. She said, well, but there isn't a lot of negative things being said. And I responded to her. I'm like, well, you know, you're right. And she right away started telling me about a conversation she was having on social media with a young man and he was saying, oh, well, you know, helicopters Just drop out of the sky. And he says, I've got a couple hours in airplanes because she posted a picture tonight. We were out flying in the instrument. We're having a nice flight tonight, having a good time. She posted a picture of us out flying. So this kid on social media from the local area, somebody she knows, and he's like, well, but airplanes are better because they just fall out. You know, they don't just fall out of the sky like a helicopter does. And although my daughter's only 16 and not a rated pilot as of yet, may start taking lessons here very soon because she's getting so involved with all this stuff. But she knows enough to say, well, that's not quite exactly what happens. She understands that you can still control the helicopter after helicopter loses its engine. Now, if you have a catastrophic failure, like in the rotor system, okay, that's different, but very, not very often domain rotor systems fail. Not saying they can't, but anybody who spent any time studying accidents, reading accidents, you're going to find that a majority of the time an accident is pilot error, whether it's airplanes, helicopters, whatever the case is, because pilots do dumb stuff. Pilots make bad decisions. And again, sometimes it's based on a number of different things that happened where anywhere along that bad judgment chain a pilot could stop and go, you know what? This is stupid. I know things aren't going my way. Today's just not the day. I should just not fly and call it the flight. So back to my daughter, who has explained to this young man on social media that helicopters don't just drop out of the sky. And what I want to talk about is, very simply put, just this isn't for any kind of a test. This isn't really training for those of you that are going to check out a video like this that aren't pilots, and maybe you're never going to become a pilot. But you're interested in understanding how the helicopters fly. And very simply, when we're under normal powered flight, you can imagine this is your rotor blade as the same as in a wing on an airplane. Okay? So these are spinning, it's moving through the air, and your airflow is coming this direction as the aircraft's moving this way. Okay? Now, in the helicopter we actually control, the tip of this blade can actually change the pitch of the blade to change the angle and change the lift. Now what happens when you lose power? You lose an engine. In a helicopter, you were dealing with airflow. That's something like this. All of a sudden, the aircraft is Descending, so that airflow is now moving up like this. So what happens is we actually have a greater angle of attack. We have more lift than we normally have during powered flight. So the reason a helicopter doesn't just fall out of the sky, it starts descending, but you don't have an engine. Your rotor system right here actually starts to speed up. It can actually start going faster, depending on make and model and load. But as you're descending, the angle of attack is actually increased, so the blade starts actually speeding up so you can control that. So with a helicopter, you can. You're descending, but you can turn left, you can turn right, you can slow down, you can speed up and essentially land the helicopter on the ground. And if you do it right, you can land safely. And I thought, good time to make this video, because a lot of people, just the general public don't understand. And there is that myth out there where people say, oh, I won't fly in a helicopter, because this is a death trap, and they're unsafe. They just fall out of the sky when something goes wrong. That's not the case. They can if you had a catastrophic failure, but that rarely happens, and that happens due to a maintenance problem or an abrupt something that a pilot does in the aircraft. That's maybe an abrupt change in a control input, but that's not very common. And Gloria was asking me, you know, for input on this as she was chatting with this young man, and I said to telling the Bell Jet Ranger for many, many, many years held the record as the safest aircraft ever built. Not airplane, not gyrocopter, not jet, any aircraft ever built. And it held that for many years. So when people say, and I've been seeing it in the comments here just in the past couple weeks, oh, they're death traps, and, oh, my God, I'd never get in one. And oh, my God, they're so dangerous. A properly maintained aircraft flown by a pilot who's sticking to the rules, sticking to the basics of what he learned, and you're flying the aircraft the way it's intended to be flown, and you're making good weather decisions. So many people fly their entire career, airplanes, helicopters, whatever, without ever having some kind of a major event or a bad accident. So when people say, oh, my God, they're just so dangerous, and, oh, my God, they're death traps, and I'll never fly in a helicopter. Helicopters just drop out of the sky. Not like an airplane that can just glide. Helicopter just drops and everybody dies. It's not like that. Just So I wanted to do this video to put the message out there. There are so many factors in why helicopters crash. It is most generally something done by the pilot that was an error. And again, it's usually a multitudes of things. A helicopter, when a fatal accident happens, once the investigation is complete, you'll find one mistake was made, a factor was overlooked, another decision was improperly made. Again, it's the bad judgment chain. There usually is a series of things that are building up and leading to a point where a fatal accident happens. And there was plenty of opportunities for a pilot along that way to say, this is just dumb, I'm not going. And we trained in, for example, the EMS field. One of the things that they trained us as new EMS pilots was anyone on the crew, the pilot himself or anybody in the crew. In the event you find yourself in that situation where, you know things aren't going good with the flight, somebody needs to say, this is stupid. This is stupid. Right? And the idea is to break that. I can't think of the word I want to use. But let's say you're going on an EMS flight. It's an emergency flight, right? But as the pilot, that's not an emergency for you. You're supposed to be just getting everyone from point A to point B safely and you're letting the medical crew do their medical emergency stuff in the back, right? But it's easy for you to get wrapped up in what they're doing. If you're listening and paying attention. Maybe it's a child in the. And you're thinking, oh, my gosh, I got a child at home. And then you push the envelope a little bit. It is so easy for everyone to get wrapped up into things going wrong, where if somebody just goes, hey, stop it. This is stupid. And everybody can take a step back for a second and think, okay, you know, this flight's been going downhill and the weather's not looking good and it's getting worse and we're trying to get there. And you know what? We need to just call it off. We need to land right now or turn around, whatever the case is. But this flight needs to end. That is what happens a majority of the time. I will say this. I'll put the link down below for the NTSB preliminary report. For those of you interested in what happened or what we know so far with that latest event, again, they're not going to give a final ruling. It's probably going to take a year before we're going to see the actual accident report. Come out. Will we get more bits and pieces along the way? Doubtful from or doubtful from reliable sources. And remember that there's been a lot of things said that may or may not be correct. And so many people are ready to put their name on a statement and say, well, I'm going to say this is what happened, or I'm going to say that's what happened. You can gather your own conclusions. But until we know the whole entire story and we know everything that went on, we know what went on behind the scenes the day before, events leading up to, in essence, it's still just speculation. So I'm going to wrap it up right there because I just want to put that message out there tonight because I don't want it to hurt our industry, and I don't think it will. Sure, there's a lot of negative things being said, a lot of things being said by the general public that may or may not ever fly in their lifetime. I think people who are generally interested in learning to fly are still going to do so. And my hope would be that one accident, because it's highly publicized, that it doesn't defer or deter someone who wants to learn to fly. Whether you're interested in learning to fly airplanes or hot air balloons or helicopters or whatever your passion is that you're interested in learning, don't let one event spoil it for you. And just remember, you don't believe absolutely everything that you read. Okay? There's a lot of good information out there and there's a whole lot of bad out there as well. So you always have to take every instance and look at the surrounding facts. And a lot of times we just have to wait until that final report comes out before we really know what really went on basically with any accident. So do me a favor, subscribe to the channel. Click the little bell when you do so you'll be notified of our upcoming videos whenever we put a new video out. We have several videos that have been getting a lot of traction that I made in the past year about flying into bad weather and why helicopters crash. We actually have seven videos on seven things that the US helicopter safety team put out in 2019 because we were having a high volume of fatal accident and fatal accidents in helicopters in 2019. And the US helicopter safety team pinpointed seven areas for pilots that they need to address and need to be thinking about to try to slow that curve or that uprising curve of fatal accidents. We had a big spike in 2008 and then it went down for a lot of years. And then it came back up. So times change, things happen. So right now, the US Helicopter safety team is pushing a lot of these different things. So I'll put that list down below if you're interested in finding out those seven things for that they need to be aware of and need to be thinking about to help reduce accidents in our time now. And I'll also put a link down there for some of the videos that people have been looking at and going, is this what happened in Calabasas? This could be what happened. Could be. Again, I'm going to hold my final. I think I'm just going to hold off a little bit longer before I start making statements about that, because there's still a lot of things when I read through it, you think, okay, it could be this. Could be that this might have happened. But I just don't really want to speculate. I'd like to learn some more and have some more real facts before I start really saying what I think may or may not have happened. And then we can discuss it, right? And we can talk about it. And some people got upset. In a video I did recently, YouTube took it down where I just was talking about it right after it and said, hey, I'm going to wait until the NTSB report comes out. And the good news is we can learn from tragic events and people got upset. Good news? That's never good news. No, a tragedy is never good news. Never. But my point is, my heart sinks every single time there's a fatal accident. It doesn't matter who's involved. Every single time I hear one goes down and it's fatal, my heart sinks. It doesn't matter who's on board. Every one of them is sad and tragic. The worst thing that happens is you have a tragic event and then nobody learns anything. And then people just go out and keep making mistakes. So when I say something good come out of it could come out of it. You take a tragic accident, something bad that's happened, and any one person maybe takes away one little nugget of information that they remember and someday make a decision because of thinking back about one specific accident, then somebody else's life was saved. That's what I meant when I made that comment. I have no idea why YouTube took that down, because it was really just impartial video saying, I'm kind of waiting on the facts. Here's what we know so far. But anyway, YouTube can do that anytime they want. All right, subscribe. Click that little bell, leave a comment down below, and we'll see you in the next video.