Ed Helicopter Crashes into Glasgow Pub

The pilot and a policewoman in the helicopter have also been named. Only two bodies recovered to far, but no further deaths reported at least.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-25173228

I saw a big headline on the Sunday Post when I was in the Co-op at lunchtime, saying "dead pilot hailed as a hero". The lead story said he fought to the last to try to get the chopper to miss the building. I have no idea how they know this. Well it is the Sunday Post.

Rolfe.
 
Soapy Sam said:
Blimps or small drones may be the way forward. Perhaps even microlights.
There has been talk about using the sort of drones used for ground attacks in Afghanistan. Not wildly popular with Joe Public.
For surveillance, a more advanced version of the quad copter Rolfe described in another thread is one possibility. These are fine for surveillance and intelligence gathering, but can't actually arrest someone.

The question about using vehicles to chase suspected villains on the ground is a complex one. There have been a number of high profile deaths and injuries of bystanders by police vehicles on the ground. If a thief, fleeing in a stolen car is dangerous, is it any safer to have him chased by police in another car? Or is that twice as dangerous?

A small, radio operated quadcopter that could track a car might be a far safer (and less expensive) option for much of what police helicopters do.
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I would say that police forces use helicopters for two different purposes which are almost mutually exclusive: firstly, they are used for crowd control, traffic management or other types of surveillance; and second, they are used for aerial pursuit of suspects in vehicles or on foot.

Manned helicopters have therefore always been the obvious choice, since they are capable of fulfilling both roles well. A powerful helicopter is capable of following all but the very fastest vehicle, and the hovering/slow flight capability of a helicopter makes it ideal for surveillance tasks. In addition, helicopters are much more versatile than fixed-wing in terms of where they can be based: since most of their work is carried out in urban areas, it's quicker and more cost-effective to be able to use a helicopter operating out of an urban heliport as opposed to a fixed-wing aircraft operating out of an airfield that is usually sited well away from main urban areas.

I don't believe that there are many commercially-available drones/unmanned copters at the moment that could fulfill the pursuit role, but obviously they would be be a viable option for surveillance. I would imagine that in this era of budget cuts, we might very well see unmanned craft being introduced in the near future, and we might also expect a manufacturer to develop unmanned drones/copters that are capable of speeds in excess of 150mph (including the capacity to carry multiple cameras and other monitoring equipment).
 
Craig B said:
Yes I raised that at #28. It means the pilot can't have been trying to use the flat pub roof as an emergency landing pad, surely; also that the gliding effect from the spinning rotors couldn't have operated. It makes helicopters seem rather insecure, as some posters have suggested.

A question, for most police purposes, would it be possible to use fixed wing aircraft? I think one was designed to replace police helicopters recently, but wasn't a success, if I remember right. Anything that might prevent a repetition of this disaster.
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I suspect that budgetary reasons (and the evolution of unmanned craft technologies) would be the primary driver of any switch to unmanned drones/copters, rather than the mitigation of accidents. Manned helicopter accidents are still, by any absolute measure, a very rare event (which is not to say that any such fatalities are not a tragedy or are an irrelevance). And of course a heavy unmanned craft would still be capable of causing fatalities on the ground if it crashed hard.

In response to your first paragraph, though, I agree: I'd take Bernoulli's principle over a large upward-pointing propeller any day........
 
Now the TV is flipping back and forward between Glasgow, where they're beginning to lift the helicopter out of the building, and New York, where there's a train all over the foreshore and four people have been killed.

:(

Rolfe.
 
I honestly wouldn't know - wouldn't most of the weight of the original building have been taken by the walls? We need Architect in this thread!

Rolfe.
 
I would think that the walls were the load bearing structures. The beams only had to support the first floor and it's occupants and not the rest of the building.
 
Pending any information on the state of the chopper, speculating on the why is merely that.
Failures are rare. The Sheriff and CHP and LAPD use a lot of them, with few emergency landings over the length of time of the use.
Even the news choppers have a good flight to event ratio.
 
Skwinty said:
I would think that the walls were the load bearing structures. The beams only had to support the first floor and it's occupants and not the rest of the building.
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Yes. Nineteenth century stone tenement. These buildings have no steel or concrete frame. Stone walls and wooden floors between storeys. Pitched slate roofs.
 
Rolfe said:
I honestly wouldn't know - wouldn't most of the weight of the original building have been taken by the walls? We need Architect in this thread!

Rolfe.
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No, we need Structural Engineer in this thread!

Speaking as someone who did a very small uni course module in structural engineering..... horizontal beams are almost always used to spread and/or redistribute/transfer loads, rather than to bear loads in their own right. They essentially balance the load so that the load is evenly borne down through the load-bearing structures (usually concrete or brick walls in low-rise buildings).

So in this particular building, it's likely that the only purpose of the horizontal beams at ceiling height was to spread the load of the floor above (which became the roof when the rest of the building was removed) to the supporting walls. As such, they wouldn't have been designed to bear any significant vertical load themselves - and certainly not the weight of several storeys: each storey would have had its own weight distributed out to the supporting walls, meaning that each set of horizontal beams only needed to support (and redistribute) the weight of the floor, and to balance the loads being borne by he supporting walls themselves.

In short, it's easy to see why a hard landing by a fairly heavy helicopter would cause the beams to fail.
 
A very useful role is missing persons. The copter can do in minutes what dozens of police would take hours to.

The toll is now up to nine dead.
 
Craig B said:
Yes. Nineteenth century stone tenement. These buildings have no steel or concrete frame. Stone walls and wooden floors between storeys. Pitched slate roofs.
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The main load bearing part for the tenements is the stairwell and the side walls. The floors are wood and the beams go between the side walls and stairwell. The front stonework was more of a facade. That is why so many tenements are now having metal straps installed which then bolt into the beams or even go all the way through to stop the facade bulging and cracking.

Think of them as skyscrapers on their side is how one engineer described them to me.
 
Nessie said:
Think of them as skyscrapers on their side is how one engineer described them to me.
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Most of them, including the original building above the pub if I remember correctly, were four storeys high. Ground floor - in that street invariably occupied by shops, pubs etc - and three upper floors.

Sadly, the death toll now seems to be nine people.
 
Craig B said:
Most of them, including the original building above the pub if I remember correctly, were four storeys high. Ground floor - in that street invariably occupied by shops, pubs etc - and three upper floors.

Sadly, the death toll now seems to be nine people.
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What he meant was how you get a row of them and they support themselves and the one on each side.
 
Nessie said:
What he meant was how you get a row of them and they support themselves and the one on each side.
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Yes, thanks for that. However nobody had noted the original building height, and I don't know if that would be useful to mention anyway.
 
It appears this helicopter is dual engine. This significantly reduces the likelihood of engine failure being the cause.

Pilot error
ran out of fuel
loss of tail rotor authority
main gearbox failure

The above would probably be the likely reasons. Then there are many many more obscure reasons that are also possible.
 
383LQ4SS said:
It appears this helicopter is dual engine. This significantly reduces the likelihood of engine failure being the cause.

Pilot error
ran out of fuel
loss of tail rotor authority
main gearbox failure

The above would probably be the likely reasons. Then there are many many more obscure reasons that are also possible.
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Another strange suggested one has been fuel contamination.
 
Craig B said:
Another strange suggested one has been fuel contamination.
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Very very rare....but possible.

I am reminded of the local news helo that had a hard landing/light crash on one of the taxi ways here. He had some decent damage to the airframe, nose and smashed his little camera turret up pretty good. He claims he was hover taxiing at around 50 feet AGL when the engines lost power and it slammed into the ground. At night I run the only FBO at TIA and we are responsible for crashed aircraft recovery (if its can be done without a crane) so we got the call to go meet the helo. I followed the Airport Ops truck out to the helo and the pilot told me that the engines just seemed to lose power. At the same time there was a fuel truck putting in some fuel as requested by the pilot. The pilot then requested that I bleed the main fuel line to the engines to help him see if he could get it started again so he could air taxi to his hanger. I refused and told him it needs to be towed to the hanger so the engines could be looked at prior to flying again. Towing it would require the involvement of more people and resources. He then opened up that his fuel gauge had been broken for some time and they were simply estimting fuel load by putting a known quantity in prior to flight and then calculating use. But he was still adamant that he had fuel in the helo because he "was pretty sure" he put 20 gallons in yesterday. He then started barking orders again about turning on the boost pumps and bleeding the main fuel line. I again refused. He got mad and called some other people over to help him. He was flying it back to the hanger after about 20 minutes. But I wasnt around or involved.

He is lucky he happened to be air taxing over a taxi way at 50 feet when he ran out of fuel.
 
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A family went to the press this morning out of concern that they still didn't have a clue what was going on and nobody in the emergency services was talking to them. Severe breakdown in communication, not good.

It seems there are still five bodies in the rubble, possibly more, and the emergency services are more concerned with dismantling the helicopter and getting it out in such a way as to preserve any evidence about what happened, than about speedy recovery of bodies. There seems to be serious concern that they might not be able to figure out what happened.

It's understandable, but there are families of missing people going absolutely nuts. They're also not even sure about the death toll. If someone has been killed who lived alone, it's perfectly possible nobody would realise until they didn't show up for work this morning.

Rolfe.
 
@Rolfe, I hadn't read that. This thing becomes more and more horrific every hour that passes. Of course people often don't think to tell their families where they are when they go out for the evening to listen to music in a bar.

Obviously if there is a fault in that type of aircraft, it's imperative that it should be identified, but alleviating the anguish of the families must be the first priority.
 
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