Kobe Bryant Crash

"Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo" (rustyvandura) 01/27/2020 at 11:46 • Filed to: None

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Sikorsky S-76

CALABASAS, Calif. (AP) — The helicopter carrying Kobe Bryant and eight others that crashed into a rugged hillside outside Los Angeles was flying in foggy conditions considered dangerous enough that local police agencies grounded their choppers... When it struck the ground, the helicopter was flying at about 160 knots (184 mph) and descending at a rate of more than 4000 feet per minute, the data showed...

!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!

What I have not read yet is who else was on the helicopter besides Kobe and Gigi.

HammerheadFistpunch > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 01/27/2020 at 11:53

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4000 ft a minute?  66 feet a minute?  holy crap.

Ash78, voting early and often > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 01/27/2020 at 11:54

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Orange Coast College baseball coach John Altobelli, 56, his wife, Keri, and their daughter Alyssa, who played on the same club team as Gianna, also were killed. Christina Mauser, who was the top assistant coach of the Mamba girls’ basketball team, as well as a mother and daughter from Orange County, identified by family and friends as Sarah and Payton Chester, also died in the crash.

-LA Times

Lots of families mourning today, very sad.

Maxima Speed > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 01/27/2020 at 12:00

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4000 ft per minute?! That sounds awful lot like a failure to trust the instruments.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > HammerheadFistpunch 01/27/2020 at 12:01

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ForSweden would know this, but how much of that decent rate is figured into the 160kt number? Are we saying that the 184 mph had a significant negative slope vector baked in? But that struck me as a very fast rate of decent and I wonder whether something mechanical might have been at issue.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Ash78, voting early and often 01/27/2020 at 12:04

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You got that right.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Maxima Speed 01/27/2020 at 12:05

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Or even to look at them?

For Sweden > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 01/27/2020 at 12:08

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160 kts is really fast.

If I had to make a wild guess (emphasis on wild), the pilot didn’t have much instrument experience and became disoriented. That’s especially dangerous in a helicopter, which is tricky to fly at low speed without a horizon out the window. He may have gotten unstable and started trading altitude for airspeed.

farscythe - makin da cawfee! > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 01/27/2020 at 12:14

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WilliamsSW > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 01/27/2020 at 12:23

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4000 fpm would be the vertical component of that speed. That’s a lot.

Commercial airliners start to break stuff when they touch down above 1000-1500 fpm or so.

And yeah 160 kts  is VERY fast in low visibility.  

Racin'Jason002 > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 01/27/2020 at 12:28

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/kobe-bryant-crash-devastates-families-of-other-victims-john-altobelli-and-christine-mauser

MasterMario - Keeper of the V8s > HammerheadFistpunch 01/27/2020 at 12:32

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45 mph for those looking for a more relatable scale .

That’s an incredibly fast rate of descent.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > WilliamsSW 01/27/2020 at 12:33

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All of this assumes that something had not broken. I’m a piloting enthusiast and understand a good deal about how things work, but these (potential) disorientation stories fascinate me because I think there would be clues, especially in a helicopter, that you were traveling very  fast. Rush of wind, rotor speed, whatever. I’m only supposing here...

Dusty Ventures > Ash78, voting early and often 01/27/2020 at 12:41

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Interesting it seems the pilot still hasn’t been identified. One has to wonder if his identity deliberately hasn’t been made public to prevent potential backlash toward him/his family.

BoxerFanatic, troublesome iconoclast. > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 01/27/2020 at 13:04

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I wonder if something failed, and the pilot was not able to get into auto-rotation... not that autorotating into a fog bank obscuring the ground is much better than just falling into one.

184 knots is a good bit of airspeed, and not likely to be doing that near the ground, especially in foggy conditions, one would hope.

4000ft./min vertical drop is significantly falling, and one might guess it to have descended into the fog from clear air above.

Going that fast, and not heeding a fog advisory, seems like they were not planning to land nearby once airborne... so weren’t concerned about local fog.

just goes to show, even flying high in clear air, if you can’t see the ground, you have no idea what you would be falling on when flying fails.

I am no pilot, and am just wildly guessing.

No matter what, it is a tragedy for all involved.

Flight may be safe on average... but flight emergencies are not an average situation, and are not safe.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > WilliamsSW 01/27/2020 at 13:12

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...vertical component...

Yeah, that .

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > BoxerFanatic, troublesome iconoclast. 01/27/2020 at 13:13

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A very sad story, to be sure.

WilliamsSW > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 01/27/2020 at 13:15

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There really is very little in the way of clues, and your body can be contradicting the noise clues . It’s impossible to comprehend how disoriented you can become and how quickly it happens when you try to fly without a visible horizon.

When I was learning to fly, I vividly recall one early evening flight where we flew down the Lake Michigan shore. My instructor had me do a 180 to the left on a hazy summer evening- toward the lake. I purposely looked directly out the window and it was very disorienting- no horizon whatsoever (similar to what JFK JR experienced probably). After maybe 10-15 seconds I had to look left where the Chicago skyline gave me comfort.  A good safe way to get a feel for it.  

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > WilliamsSW 01/27/2020 at 13:27

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JFK JR with his foot in a cast and a high performance aeroplane... My pal the retired P-3 test pilot was not very generous about that one...

I used to think I’d missed out not becoming a pilot, and while I am still very  interested in all things aero, my interests have moved on. Or congealed. Or whatever...

Ash78, voting early and often > Dusty Ventures 01/27/2020 at 13:33

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My bad, I just didn’t quote it for brevity. Not much except the name:

The pilot, identified as Ara Zobayan

I suspect they might keep the name private if he had lived, just for security reasons.

WilliamsSW > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 01/27/2020 at 13:58

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Yeah, I recall JFK JR vividly — it happened in between my 2nd and 3rd flying lesson.

While I was pre flighting the Cessna for that 3rd lesson, one of the instructors that I hadn’t met yet came up to me and asked me what I thought about the accident - I think maybe she was wondering if any students were scared off by it.  I wasn’t, of course, and.i got to know her and flew with her later on. She was a great instructor (my flight school seemed to have done a great job hiring in general).

You can tell a Finn but you can't tell him much > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 01/27/2020 at 14:07

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With no visibility the human brain gets disoriented amazingly easily. A few years ago I was driving to work through a really nasty snow storm. About a mile after leaving home I drove through an open area where there was heavy blowing snow. Driving slowly because of the conditions, a gust of wind blew snow from the back left side of my truck and it swirled up over the hood. I literally could not see the end of my hood, but the swirling snow made it look and feel like the truck was rolling over. I eased off the gas, gently steered into the roll and eased on the brakes. I came to a stop in the middle of the road with my truck at a 45° angle to the direction I should have been going. At no point was the truck actually rolling, but my brain fully believed we were going over based on what I could see.

ttyymmnn > WilliamsSW 01/27/2020 at 14:17

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Have you seen the debris field? I think that’s the tail all the way over to the right. 

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > You can tell a Finn but you can't tell him much 01/27/2020 at 14:40

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Interesting. I can imagine that.