Wow.

http://sofrep.com/4783/apache-crash-whe ... 8SOFREP%29

Ouch. I see a desk job in his future.

Gump

GumpAir wrote:Ouch. I see a desk job in his future.

Gump

I would like to think there is NO job in his/ her future....
The first low pass looked under control and kool.. The crash event clearly shows a lack of basic flying skills. The pilot needs to live in a cardboard box on the streets till he/she pays back the taxpayers who owned the heli the 15 million it cost to replace it... Only then do they get to have a life... ..

Ben.

Wow, ouch, and holy shit.

Stupid is as Stupid does! Hope this guy didn't splatter any folks on the ground. What a JERK!!!!

Amazingly, nobody seriously hurt. The freeze frame shows he missed one guy on the ground by only a foot or two.

A friend of mine was just killed and another seriously injured doing the exact same manuever in an airplane. Made a pass on the family dwelling pulled it up and never regained the energy to round it out... the show happened in front of the whole family..... Bad deal

lowlevelops wrote:A friend of mine was just killed and another seriously injured doing the exact same manuever in an airplane. Made a pass on the family dwelling pulled it up and never regained the energy to round it out... the show happened in front of the whole family..... Bad deal

There has been many a tragic story with this scenario, pilots buzzing friends and family. It's one thing to do it at altitude, another down low when the margins are down to zero. Most pilots who do this at altitude never look at they're altimeter to see if they end up at the same altitude or higher when they begin. Add in the Kodak courage and the fog that descends on judgement when "performing" for an audience and your just about guaranteed to become a statistic,... a dead one.

Forty plus years of being around this flying stuff has repeatedly reinforced that "Showing-off" or "Hot-doggin'-it" commonly ends with "showing" the pilot being a FOOL and NOT cool.
At least-thankfully-everyone survived this one......

Another in a VERY long list of FOOLs.
lc

Disclosure. I've come within a gnat's ass of being the FOOL myself a couple of times when I thought I had PLENTY of 'cushion'....
If'n I'da tried it without all that "extra cushion", I wouldn't be here today. Nuff said.

Littlecub wrote:Forty plus years of being around this flying stuff has repeatedly reinforced that "Showing-off" or "Hot-doggin'-it" commonly ends with "showing" the pilot being a FOOL and NOT cool.
At least-thankfully-everyone survived this one......

Another in a VERY long list of FOOLs.
lc

Disclosure. I've come within a gnat's ass of being the FOOL myself a couple of times when I thought I had PLENTY of 'cushion'....
If'n I'da tried it without all that "extra cushion", I wouldn't be here today. Nuff said.

Top 5 rule in my personal rule book is "NO Showing Off"!! I'll do low passes, but only when safe. No aerobatics for me!! That's not the way I want to go to my grave. And not the memory I want to have upon others.

........"NO Showing Off"!! I'll do low passes, but only when safe. No aerobatics for me!! That's not the way I want to go to my grave. And not the memory I want to have upon others.

I agree. Great philosophy. Mine too.....
My point with the disclaimer is that I DIDN'T think I was 'pushing it' when I planned it......
When you operate close to the ground things happen DAMN fast-and if you don't try it 10 times IN THOSE CONDITIONS-each time getting a little lower and closer-you may be in for a big rude surprise.
Ask about 10,000+ pilots who got their wings early in the great beyond........

lc

I don't know if the Army still has "shit burning details", like they did in Viet Nam. If so, I'm guessing they now have a warrant officer or two available for a loooonnnnnnggggg stint in that detail.

Expensive mistake, and VERY lucky nobody was killed. It was really close.

MTV

Amazing how many guys he missed, both behind and and front of him, and by how little.

I'm no heli pilot, and not to say that there isn't a bit of hot-dog airshowmanship here, but isn't a "return-to-target" maneuver pretty standard for these guys? My guess is he disregarded the altitude (MSL, not AGL) and the affect on his performance that would have...

I dunno. Never been in the army. Would surprise me if close strafing runs on your fellow GIs or ground crew were recommended........

lc

I was the safety office at my first squadron and at the NARF test facility. Yes, you could say the pilot demonstrated some poor headwork there. The behavior in the Navy is called "Flathatting." The result, if you don't die, is permanent loss of flight status, if not court marshal. There is no exception, no excuses, no do over. It is really clear in OPNAV regs. The reason for the harsh punishment is it is more a disease and it is incurable. Folks who do it, will do it again until they kill themselves or somebody else. This is based on long running statistics.

Now this will sound very politically incorrect, but it is unfortunately true. My first squadron VR-24, had the first group of female Naval Aviators. Most where fine, but a few where hopeless. They didn't apply any standards, either size, or qualifications to the first group. If they couldn't master a task, like instrument flying, you had to keep training them, and training them and training them. We had one that could never pass an instrument check, almost twenty check rides, never passed. We had another, we shall just use her first name, Suzanne. She was one of the first female graduates of the Naval Academy. Now she had no problems with the flying, was of proper size and physical strength. She had a fatal flaw, she was extremely arrogant and quite the show off. She earned the nickname, "Catwoman" due the way and amount of makeup she wore flying. Anyhow, there is a pretty strict rule about flying formation with passengers on board or un-breifed formation. Well she liked to do both. The time I wrote her up on it nearly cost me my commission, heavy heat from DC. Women do no evil and suffer no consequence or you are an evil woman hating male bigot. Well that message had barely cooled off, when Suzanne collided with her boyfriend's aircraft in an almost exact repeat of what I had cited before, killing all 22 people on board both. First accident in my squadron in 22 years. Funny, that disciplinary letter disappeared from my service jacket within 48 hours and was never mentioned from then on.

It was really sad, I lost some really good friends there, and it basically ruined it for qualified and excellent female Naval Aviators from then on. They always had to prove they where not there because of some PC agenda.

Back to the Army Helo pilot. I know the Army has similar rules to that of the Navy. I'll put it like a skipper did waiting for one of his pilots that did a gear up takeoff(!) from Rota Spain (really dumb). The captain of the carrier asked if the pilot was hurt? The skipper replied "not yet!"

Lucky no one was killed. These kind of spontaneous air shows happen in all aviation and as was mentioned, it is very difficult to cure. The pilots who do it, like it and can't see how immoral (yes, immoral to endanger others) it is. They don't usually quit doing it, even when they get in trouble. One of the problems is, other pilots seem to be reluctant to report them, confront them, fire them and ostracize them. Remember the B-52 crash some years back. The pilot had been reprimanded for his previous unapproved low level aerobatics, but no one had had the guts to relieve him of duty...he killed three others and was lucky not to kill many more. I like aerobatics, too. But there is a proper way to do it without excessive danger to yourself, others and the aircraft.

I know our military "HAS" more aircraft than any other organization on the planet but it seems like they destroy aircraft disproportionately.

Any statistics on that (and statistics never lie). The worst pilot we ever had in our flight department was an ex-army chopper pilot that loved to tell everyone that couldn't run fast enough that he had wrecked five helicopters

Way back when...when I was playing with dirt bikes in the desert, we called them pit racers. They were the guys who saved their highest speed and most daring maneuvers for the pit lane where people could see and admire them instead of using that skill out there in the 50 miles of open desert where it really mattered. I see the same thing today at any LZ for a skydiving school. Most of the jumpers save their diva performance for the last 200 ft. where the probability of someone watching or, (praise the Lord), catching his landing on video and posting it on the internet, is highest.

I would expect lots of this stuff happens "in theater" when our guys are deployed to far away places. As for statistics, I recently received some amazing figures on WWII in an email. Granted, all the stops were pulled out for that action, but here is just ONE that will set the scale of what those guys went through:

According to the AAF Statistical Digest, in less than four years (December 1941- August 1945), the US Army Air Forces lost 14,903 pilots, aircrew and assorted personnel plus 13,873 airplanes --- inside the continental United States. They were the result of 52,651 aircraft accidents (6,039 involving fatalities) in 45 months It was carnage!!

On another note, having worked on the Apache in the design and flight testing phase, I can say with admiration that if he had NOT trashed the tail rotor, it would have probably been a happy ending with maybe a little tail between the legs. As it was, the airframe saved the lives of two idiots that we can re-purpose to burning shit on one of MTV's details.

YB

Looks like a combination of "settling with power" and a vacuum between the ears .