“It looks like they’re overflying a canopy of trees. A helo doesn’t help you much in this case.”
When I said " I always thought the one advantage a helicopter had was that you could just land if things got to bad" what I meant was that you can land BEFORE it gets impossible to continue.
Can anyone here, maybe a real helicopter pilot, comment on whether it’s a) possible, b) advisable, to hover a heli in IMC ? Or just hover to land ?
I just have secondary evidence in that most rescue services quit the mission if IMC is prevalent. There was a crash in EDMA last year where a guy landed despite RVR000 and the plane started to burn. They got all out alive, but the rescue helicopter couldn’t, or wouldn’t, land there because there was no view.
So, I guess it must be somehow dangerous, no ?
aart wrote:
As an aside, helicopter flying requires currency even more so than fixed wing.
My thinking entirely and the reason why I never did a rotorwing license. I simply wouldn’t be able to stay current enough.
Also each helicopter type needs a specific rating, according to a pilot I know. This prevents one simply jumping into a different type and flying off, which greatly restricts “mobility” in the rotary scene.
Regards S&R, obviously I have zero personal experience 
but the big helis used here in the UK have stabilisation and they can hover in IMC without moving sideways. I spoke to one pilot and he said you could set it up 100ft AGL and climb down on a rope and walk away, and it would sit there in more or less the same spot until the fuel runs out It is inertial (not GPS) so it works on zero acceleration rather than holding a specific lat/long position, but it is pretty good. But they won’t fly if there is IMC down to the surface, or nearly so, not least because the rotor could hit something like a tree.
I have never flown in IMC and it is strongly discouraged, although it depends a bit on the instrumentation of course. Hovering in IMC without autopilot is a big no-no. Hovering a helicopter is all about taking in the plentiful visual cues around you. If you hover properly that’s all the cues you get..
I’ve never flown an R44, but my Enstrom Shark is very easy to hover, even just staring at a spot under the nose. Fog might make it untidy and illegal, but not impossible. The Enstrom can be trimmed to hover (briefly) hands-off; I imagine that the R44 is the same, or it would be rather tiring to fly.
The US Army’s HU-1 pilots were expected to fly in IMC with the AC breaker pulled leaving only needle, ball and airspeed – as described in Jim Dulin’s book “Contact Flying”.
Hovering out of ground effect in hard IMC – well, the R44 and Shark aren’t certified for that, but that’s not how most private helicopters are operated. A vertical descent is an exception for confined areas, rather than the rule.
Helicopters and bushplanes share similar normal approach speeds and profiles. A helicopter can usually flare to a hover, but if there’s insufficient power for that a run-on landing is much the same whether the hardware comes from Menominee or Moultrie.
The two are so similar, yet subtly different, that it takes a few circuits to re-train from one to the other.
Non-helo pilot, but a few things :
“you hear the stall warning beeping”.
Hmmm, don’t think an helo can’t stall, that’s all the thing about the helos.
By the way, the helo wing is the rotor. Maybe what’s heard is the rotor stall warning ? or oppositely, the rotor overspeed warning ?
“Hover or land in IMC”
Somes pilots do land in IMC. Army pilots are specially trained for operating in sandy theaters (african, middle east, etc) and specially trained for landing in the dust cloud ineluctably formed by the rotor wash.
But the problem for this R44 pilot would have been to find a suitable terrain to land. It is unlikely the ground fog would be so dense he would not have seen the immediate ground and references (let’s say 50 meters away) to land, if he found before that a suitable terrain.
In the mid 90s I spent 2 weeks on a repetition maneuver with a rescue squadron flying Sea King. They could certainly hover in anything. The winch operator even have a separate little joystick that is used to position the aircraft in the horizontal plane, the pilots doing nothing. Some inertial/gyro automatic positioning system I guess. They also have radar. Today the civilian SAR helicopters fly with night vision googles at night, but I don’t know if they land in IMC. I think so though, they use a special GPS system for approach and departure.
North Sea heli transport is IFR all the way, but that is a very different flying from inland general purpose flying that is almost exclusively VFR.
jeff64 wrote:
Somes pilots do land in IMC. Army pilots are specially trained for operating in sandy theaters (african, middle east, etc) and specially trained for landing in the dust cloud ineluctably formed by the rotor wash.
The same goes for all helicopter flying in snow, but I wouldn’t call it IMC. They can always simply gain a few feet of altitude, and the sun is shining.
Got to this thread a bit late… but as an R44 pilot I can share this insight: I have compiled accident statistics of EVERY Robinson accident in the UK ever. EVERY fatal R44 accident was caused by flying into IMC. Interestingly, the majority of R22 fatal accidents were caused by carb icing.
Mantra is simple: don’t lose sight of the ground. If you think you’re about to, slow down, descend and land if necessary.
That is tough to watch. Ugh.
Was the pilot a professional (cpl/atp)?
A few seconds before crashing when the bride screams in fear of her life he yells “calma” (be quiet, relax?) as if he were embarrassed to scare his passengers even though he must have known that he’ll crash now.
Human factors wise that is an interesting observation I think. He knew it but did not want to accept that he was in a very bad situation. Narrow flashlight beam perhaps jumping around between “must land at wedding”, “this is getting uncomfortable”, “maintain face in front of passengers”.
I’ll use this video to remind me that from “all is well” to “hell” can be a matter of a few minutes, even seconds and to set my gates and follow them strictly!
Land, call a taxi, live!
