Ed Helicopter Crashes into Glasgow Pub

Chances are it was just leaving or returning for a Friday evening patrol over the city centre. The heliport is about a mile away.

There were some early tweets from someone saying how calm the night was and how it just dropped like a stone. It really looks like a mechanical failure.
 
Since everyone who was on board is now dead, and the helicopter itself is pretty wrecked, it's going to be quite a job to figure it out.

Rolfe.
 
newyorkguy said:
Gordon Smart, the editor of the Scottish Sun newspaper reportedly said he saw the helicopter falling out of the sky "nose over tail."...
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That may be a misquote. I don't believe he used the phrase "nose over tail" at all. Here's what Smart actually said:

The Scottish Sun's new editor, Gordon Smart, was an eyewitness at last night’s helicopter crash in Glasgow city centre. The incident, which saw a police helicopter crash into the roof of the Clutha bar in Stockwell Street around 10:30pm, happened whilst the editor was getting his car from the roof of a nearby multistory car park.

Writing for The Sun and The Scottish Sun this morning Smart said he initially heard “a misfiring engine” and “panicked and ducked because I felt like something was going to land on me”. He adds: “I looked up and saw a helicopter falling out of the sky, just like a stone dropping. “It landed a few hundred yards away from me but there was no explosion or fireball.” Link
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Rolfe said:
Since everyone who was on board is now dead, and the helicopter itself is pretty wrecked, it's going to be quite a job to figure it out.

Rolfe.
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I do not think that will be the case. All the parts are contained and easily found and they just piece it back together until they find a broken bit which would have caused the crash.

If there had been a fire it would be much harder. The Lockerbie wreckage was spread for miles and there were multiple fires.
 
I went to see Esperanza a couple of weeks ago in Perth and was due to see them again in a fortnight at Pivo Pivo. A friend goes to almost all their gigs and we couldn't reach her last night but she got in touch this morning - she had been at a wedding.
 
He definitely said "nose-over-tail" on the BBC - I've had BBC News 24 on all day. But I do take on board what has been said about eyewitness accounts.
 
Rolfe said:
Since everyone who was on board is now dead, and the helicopter itself is pretty wrecked, it's going to be quite a job to figure it out.
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The United Kingdom's Air Accidents Investigation Branch is undoubtedly already on the scene. Air crash investigators have a lot of technology to guide them. For instance they can easily determine if the helicopter's engine was under power when the crash happened. They can usually get a good idea as to roughly how fast the main rotor was turning or whether it was freewheeling. Do Scottish helicopter's have black boxes that record data?

I'll be surprised if the AAIB can't determine the cause. The helicopter is of course totally wrecked but the fact there was no fire is a good development for the crash reconstruction team.
 
Nessie said:
I do not think that will be the case. All the parts are contained and easily found and they just piece it back together until they find a broken bit which would have caused the crash.

If there had been a fire it would be much harder. The Lockerbie wreckage was spread for miles and there were multiple fires.
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I was really thinking, how do you tell what was broken from the crash from what was broken before the crash. Or if the cause was actually the sudden incapacity of the pilot. (That's going to be a challenging post mortem.)

But you're right, it's amazing what can be figured out even from far more adverse circumstances. (There was only one fire at Lockerbie, and the part that was consumed wasn't critical to figuring out what happened, but as you say the important bits were strewn for miles. I just hope the AAIB don't throw a googly into this one like they did into their Lockerbie report.) Someone was saying something about a black box, on TV. I didn't really pick up whether there was one or wasn't one.

Rolfe.
 
newyorkguy said:
The United Kingdom's Air Accidents Investigation Branch is undoubtedly already on the scene. Air crash investigators have a lot of technology to guide them. For instance they can easily determine if the helicopter's engine was under power when the crash happened. They can usually get a good idea as to roughly how fast the main rotor was turning or whether it was freewheeling. Do Scottish helicopter's have black boxes that record data?

I'll be surprised if the AAIB can't determine the cause. The helicopter is of course totally wrecked but the fact there was no fire is a good development for the crash reconstruction team.
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Don't start me on the AAIB. But that aside, you're right of course.

Rolfe.
 
newyorkguy said:
If I can I'd like to add a current news link from a U.S. TV station.

Was this helicopter on a routine police patrol? Many of the big cities in the U.S. (including the one I live in) have them.
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Probably. It's a common sight over the city , or even miles away.
...I never worried too much about safety on the helicopter. They are so powerful, when that main rotor is turning you feel the vibration in every bone.

It was flying home on the big commercial airliners that sometimes scared me. I
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I know exactly what you mean. My helicopter experience has been on flights to offshore rigs. You feel more part of the crew on a chopper, because it's smaller than an airliner and there is no physical separation from the flight crew.

The thing about power is that when it fails, there is nothing holding a chopper in the sky. If it was in hover or near hover when the failure happened, there is no forward momentum to give lift, no ability to glide.
There's the autorotation effect of the rotor if it works and that's your lot.
If it doesn't work, you are in a grand piano in mid air.

What's a bit surprising is the absence of any fire. There must have been live electrics shorting out all over. If a fuel tank was punctured, the result might have been an inferno.

Very bad, but might have been a lot worse.
 
Soapy Sam said:
... What's a bit surprising is the absence of any fire. There must have been live electrics shorting out all over. If a fuel tank was punctured, the result might have been an inferno.

Very bad, but might have been a lot worse.
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Thank heaven. But it is being suggested that modern fuel tank design has massively reduced the risk of fire. Is that so?
 
Cool Hand Luke said:
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"Safely decend" being a somewhat relative term in such situations.
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Well the ability to aim for something soft-ish or at least unoccupied by others is good.

Rolfe said:
The BBC are reporting three deaths, at the moment*, with people still trapped in the wreckage nearly 12 hours into the incident. Hospital staff have said that some of the injuries they are dealing with are horrific.

We do not know whether the helicopter pilot is among the dead. I suspect that if he is still alive, he is among the injured. I think the title of this thread is in appallingly bad taste.

I was just leaving a cinema near Glasgow last night at the time this happened. Not a care in the world. Just like those in the pub, I suppose, before the world collapsed on them.

Rolfe.

* ETA: BBC page now amended to only one death, though the situation still seems fluid.
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Eight dead now.

jj said:
It obviously is, and one that shows utter contempt for the victims of this accident, as well as the pilot and those aboard the copter.
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I agree.
Craig B said:
To discuss the title, or the event?
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Rolfe said:
My information is that the explanation for the lack of fire may be this.

http://www.oilandgasuk.co.uk/Health_Safety_Report_2012/fire_fighting_equipment.cfm

On the other hand some of the BBC reports seemed to be hinting it may have crashed because it ran out of fuel. (What am I saying, the BBC make stuff up as they go along.)

Rolfe.
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Running out of fuel would not prevent autorotation, but you need time* to get into autorotate mode and that requires height. Ironically, it's safer to have a power loss at height than low down in any aircraft. Height means time to respond. Sounds like they didn't have that. I don't know if they got a radio message off or not.

*(seconds)
 
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Rolfe said:
Do you think the roof would have been unusually weak as a result? Though I suppose something like that would probably break through many roofs.

Rolfe.
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Plummeting masses of metal are not allowed for in any building codes.
 
Rolfe said:
Due to my intense research into the Lockerbie disaster, and the upcoming 25th anniversary of that in only three weeks - planning to go to commemoration services in the town and so on - I've been a bit prone to nightmares about aircraft falling out of the sky on to unsuspecting people on the ground.

It doesn't happen often, but it's catastrophic when it does. It certainly seems as if it has been a catastrophic failure of the helicopter. Unless the pilot had a catastrophic heart attack or something like that?

Rolfe.
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It is very difficult for a copter to go "nose over tail", but.. if the tail rotor fails, the machine will rotate rapidly around the main rotor, and may appear to be doing what is reported.
Not much time to sort out the event though, as it occurs.
 
As usual with 24-hour news coverage, a very little information is being repeated endlessly.
One thing I have not heard anyone mention is a smell of kerosene. Choppers are often called "paraffin budgies", because they stink of aviation fuel. A lot of talk about dust in the air- probably rubble ash from the roof- but has anyone heard a smell of fuel mentioned?
 
Soapy Sam said:
...What's a bit surprising is the absence of any fire. There must have been live electrics shorting out all over. If a fuel tank was punctured, the result might have been an inferno.
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The tanks are pretty well protected -- I think they're usually double-walled and crash-resistant -- I think fuel lines with residual fuel often start the fires and then allow heat or sparks to enter the tank.

The fact there was no fire -- was there a fuel smell at the site I wonder? (Eta I see apparently there was not) -- raises the possibility the craft ran out of fuel. Something the investigators will quickly look at, I'm sure. And if it was fuel exhaustion that might not be strictly pilot error, either. It could be a problem with the gauges or a mechanical fault that caused a much higher than normal fuel use.
 
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Soapy Sam said:
What's a bit surprising is the absence of any fire. There must have been live electrics shorting out all over. If a fuel tank was punctured, the result might have been an inferno.
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Rolfe said:
On the other hand some of the BBC reports seemed to be hinting it may have crashed because it ran out of fuel. (What am I saying, the BBC make stuff up as they go along.)

Rolfe.
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In a quick read-through of the thread on pprune.org (pro pilots generally), this model of chopper has a rubber membrane within the tank to lessen the chance of catastrophic puncture + fire. Apparently, it also has two tanks of differing size and the low-fuel warning would have given the pilot a 10-minute window to get down somewhere safe. The consensus thus far (speculation based on observable data) seems to be that due to the apparent absense of damage to the rotor blades, the main rotor wasn't rotating (or wasn't rotating enough to provide lift).

Fitz
 
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