ScoobyNet.com - Subaru Enthusiast Forum - Top Gear Helicopter Crash

Quote:

Originally Posted by scunnered (Post 10567279)

It looks like the pilot banked too steeply and scrubbed off far to much forward speed. When he was banked over at that angle he'd need to be going much faster otherwise the aircraft would settle in its own rotor wash. You can see from the onboard video he tried to correct it by inputing a slight left cyclic correction. It was too little too late.

To simplify, the aircraft should be sitting on top the lift generated by the rotor. At that speed and angle, any lift being generated is almost parallel to the ground, and the aircraft would simply slide out of the sky. A few extra knots and he might have made it.
So definitely pilot error (in my opinion).

As I understand it, as long as the rotor is turning and the blades have a positive angle of attack, the rotor must be producing lift which will act upwards above the rotor. The point is, is there enough lift to support the weight of the helicopter?

If the helicopter was likely to slide off the generated lift vector because of horizontal motion, then it would not be possible to fly it out of the hover.

In this case, it looks as though the machine was in a fast descent due to the way it was being flown,and when the pilot applied a lot of pitch to the blades with the collective lever to level the aircraft, the extra drag from the blades was more than the engine could cope with so the helicopter continued into the ground. The blades appear to be a bit slow just before the helicopter hit the ground.

If that was the cause then it was pilot error of course, unless there was a mechanical failure at just the wrong time which is usually when such a thing seems to happen of course.

It is always dangerous to speculate in such cases however.

Les