Did my share of this type of flying, under pressure to get someone important to some unimportant meeting. Pilot lost control of the aircraft, his surroundings and crashed into the ground. Seen it happen many times. Happens more often than people realize. You have to know when to call it a day and go home.

There is no excuse for crashing a helicopter. You can land it virtually anywhere and live to fly another day. I am still here thanks to experienced Vietnam veterans teaching me how to fly safely while pushing the limits.

If you push the limits often enough, it will eventually catch up to you!

The pilot made several mistakes that lead to this accident. He should have given up sooner and just flown back to an airfield. Then there would be no tragic accident for everyone to be talking about.

People need to remember that he was flying for a company that makes money by providing transportation services. If you cancel flights due to weather, you are not making any money. The company is under pressure to complete flights. The pilot is under pressure to make customers happy by getting them where they want to go. I am by no means making excuses for the pilot. He and his passengers paid the price.

But the end result is that the pilot was responsible to maintain control of the aircraft and the safety of the passengers, to include persons/property on the ground. He was flying around under VFR/SVFR rules and messed up by taking unnecessary risks.

Yes, he could have pulled pitch and just flown back to an airfield. That is what he was trained to do in situations like this. Especially, if he was a certified instrument flight instructor as I thought I had read yesterday in some article. That is what he should be teaching other pilots to do. But the pressure to complete the mission caused him to break some rules and take risks.

I flew helicopters for 20 years in the military as a test pilot. Flown all over the world and in every kind of weather/environment. Helicopters are expensive to operate. Why one pilot, cost! The helicopter is expensive. The pilot, maintenance and insurance, expensive. It’s just not a cheap form of transportation. Operators do everything they can to reduce cost. I think the average cost of a medivac flight is around $11K.

Having a second pilot/crew member does reduce risks and accidents. The two pilots/crew members are more likely to discuss options and make less risky decisions. In the military you will have an accident investigation board, just like the NTSB/FAA go through all of the records and try to figure out all of the contributing factors to an accident like this. I have been on a few boards. It’s not fun investigating your friends and having to say they made a mistake. You will always find multiple contributing factors to an accident. Lack of training. Over confidence. Taking unnecessary risks. Consistently breaking rules/regulations, etc.

I have been scared more times than I can remember. Flying in bad weather. Flying in bad weather at night using night vision goggles or unaided. Bullets being shot at you. When you are under pressure to complete the mission, you are very vulnerable to making deadly mistakes. Especially when you are single pilot and have no one to question your decisions.

I have lost a lot of friends to helicopter accidents both in combat and during training. When a helicopter crashes, it is amazing the forces that are at play. When you see a titanium blade spar snap like a toothpick, you know the forces during the accident were substantial. And if it catches fire, well, jet fuel is very flammable for a reason!

Someone once said that a helicopter is made up of a thousand parts all trying to go in a thousand different directions at the same time. And helicopters do not naturally like to fly. You have to make it go where you want it too. When something goes wrong, you have to respond immediately to the emergency or end up in a worse situation than the first.

For me, I can remember my first flight by myself. Flying a fully manual TH-55 was more fun than anything I have ever done before. Using both hands and both feet to keep the aircraft under control. It only got better after that flight. Modern helicopters are a blast to fly.

Medivac pilots/crew take a lot of risks to help someone else. They get very little credit for the dangers they face daily. Power lines everywhere, antennas, lousy landing sites, etc. When the weather is bad and someone crashes their car, the pilots go out in that same bad weather to help save someone else. Many never come home.

To all those medivac pilots out there, keep your head on a swivel and keep up the good work. Fly safely so you can live to fly another day!

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As Thermionic previously stated, the most likely cause is that he was flying in the fog/clouds and developed vertigo. It is very easy to lose your sense of right side up vs down when you lose your visual reference and your internal senses are telling you something else. This is something that every pilot can encounter when flying in the clouds, fog or at night.

Below is a good explanation:

"Vertigo is a false sense of movement, causing confusion, disorientation—and, eventually, incapacitation. According to the FAA, vertigo and spatial disorientation (SD) contribute to 15 percent of accidents, typically at night or in instrument meteorological conditions (IMC). Most are fatal, and experienced pilots are not immune. The U.S. Air Force investigated 633 crashes between 1980 and 1989 and referenced SD in 13 percent. Non-instrument-rated pilots have a life expectancy of less than three minutes in IMC, probably because of SD.

Positional sense in space occurs from combining visual and gravitational input, a properly functioning inner ear, and proprioception—brain feedback from nerve receptors. Ever induced a “dead arm” from lying on it? Other than looking, you have no idea where it is. That is failure of proprioception. Your inner ear plays a big role in vertigo. Inboard of your ears is a complex system of three semicircular canals oriented in pitch, roll, and yaw planes. Specialized cells sense movement of fluid inside the tubes and transmit information to your brain. That’s how theme park simulators trick you into believing you are upside down, or, when aboard a stationary train and another train beside you starts to move, why it creates confusion.

Initially pilots experiencing vertigo/SD acknowledge conflict between sensations and instruments; the disconnect then blurs—and finally, incapacitation follows with nausea, visual disturbances, muscle spasms, and panic. Different flying maneuvers provoke insidious, yet compelling and specific, forms of disorientation. Unlike other in-flight emergencies such as cockpit fire or catastrophic engine failure, the spatially disoriented pilot does not perceive there is anything wrong. The aptly named graveyard spiral occurs after a bank; feeling the nose drop, the pilot pulls back to initiate a climb or reduce perceived rate of descent. A tighter turn ensues that magnifies the effect and leads to a stall, overstressing the aircraft or flying into the ground.

The leans occurs after a routine turn with sudden transition to level flight provoking a feeling that one is turning the opposite way. The pilot therefore turns back to the original bank, attempting to correct to a perceived proper orientation. If a pilot turns his head out of the plane of rotation while executing a turn, perhaps looking down at a chart, a rolling sensation may occur and, depending on orientation, erroneous pitch, yaw, or roll inputs may result.

Another illusion convinces pilots they are inverted after a high-performance climb. After leveling off, a lightness in one’s seat is felt while contemporaneous seat-back pressure, caused by continued acceleration, induces continued pitch increase, eventually transitioning to the sensation of inversion."

Pilots are taught to transition to instruments when encountering vertigo and to trust their instruments. Imagine that your senses are telling you you are right side up and your instruments are telling you are in a bank diving at a high rate of speed. It is hard to ignore your body and trust your instruments. You spent a lifetime trusting your senses. The correct thing to do is follow your instruments, level the aircraft and start gaining altitude. Altitude is your friend in a helicopter.

When the pilot flew into the fog, started circling in order to locate his position on the ground he most likely started to encounter vertigo or SD. He did not realize how close he was to the hills and entered into an unknown dive/bank that he was unable to recover from or even realized before the aircraft hit the hillside.

Its happened to me and every other pilot I know. It is a scary feeling when you are as close to the ground as this pilot was. You have to recognize it quickly and climb to safety. Having a second pilot might have prevented this accident as the second pilot might not have been encountering vertigo and realized that they were in a dire situation. The second pilot, as they were taught, would take the controls from the first pilot and place the aircraft in a safe flight envelope.

Many times during my career I have had to take the controls away from my copilot because they did not recognize the dangerous position they were in. With that said, there were times I was flying and my pilot in command took over the controls. There is nothing more scary than watching your rotor blades start hitting a stationary object or the ground coming in your direction faster than you planned.