Emergency Services Helicopters

[DerbyBorn]

Not trying to suggest this would have had any effect on the recent crash - but when I see the local Police Helicopter hovering or searching our area I do wonder what would happen if a warning light was to come on indicating a problem. It is about 10 miles from its base.

I think every park and other open space in urban areas should be marked with an "H" for emergency use.

It could also help if there was a local incident as it would give safe access to the area.

Seeing things like sport ground floolight columns or telegraph poles must be difficult - so to plan for an emergency seems to make sense to me.

Twin engined aircraft could not be more than a prescribed number of minutes from an emergency airport for similar reasons until engines were more reliable (ETOPS).

[Scott M]

All things considered, helicopters are blindingly reliable. The problem with them comes that the time between waning lights coming on and the ground coming up to meet the bird is mostly proportional to the gravitational constant...

I notice there was the odd mention in some of the BBC News articles that helicopters can glide, no doubt imbuing a sense of worthy pilots heading for a nearby green area as their last action[1], but helicopter glide angles are something like 5 degrees off dead vertical and entirely there to get the blades back up to speed so that, at 25' off the ground, they can yank the bird back to the horizontal and have a cushioned crash.

Like smoking and gas piped into the home, helicopters would be laughed at, and rabidly attacked by the Daily Mail, if they were invented now as a completely insane idea - "You want to pump an explosive gas into people's homes and let them light it? Are you mad?!?" - which is small beer to the idea of getting 23 tonnes of Chinook off the ground with nothing but 6 hockey sticks whirling about.

[1] I'm not scoffing at pilots here, they do this, they die and they do their damndest to try not to take anyone with them.

[polygonum]

Shouldn't that be eight?

[polygonum]

As you were - the photo I had in mind simply makes it look like four at each end.

[fred]

In article , DerbyBorn writes

What an absolute load of c*ck.

I can only assume that you started early tonight.

[alan]

7.5 accidents per 100,000 hours of flying (about 45x worse than fixed wing) From a few samples, the UK police seem to use each of their helicopters from 500 to 1000 flying hours per annum.

[Scott M]

[Scott M]

For something that has no safety net, a device called a Jesus Bolt and requires more co-ordination to drive than rubbing your tummy while patting your head, yes, they're blindingly reliable!

"To take off you put on a phenominal amount of power and, against all the laws of physics, it takes off instead of screwing itself into the ground."

[Martin Brown]

They can land at a pinch in a very tight space provided the rotor is still going and they have night vision gear. It is likely that the pilot in this incident with total loss of everything was aiming for a carpark. Crumpling cars provides a slightly softer landing but he didn't quite make it. His optimum glide path is something like 5 degrees off vertical and accelerating downwards at 9.8m/s^2 is very unforgiving. In theory he can do something clever at the last moment to make the thing autogyro but how well it works is anybody's guess.

There are a surprisingly large number of open areas when you have a birds eye view even in the most urban of environments. Think carparks and green spaces or for that matter at a pinch dual carriageway roads.

Electricity pylons and wires are a bit of nuisance as are trees but you can't cut them all down.

The reliability of the kit isn't normally a problem. This was a freak accident. Many more people have been killed driving on the roads since.

[Apprentice 65]

[DerbyBorn]

I wasn't trying to suggest it would help in this instance.

Spaces without pylons and posts exist and could be identified. Ideally near motorways and in urban areas.

[ss]

Civil/police heli flightpaths naybe slightly less pre-planned but certainly in the RAF they have every pylon/building and any other obstruction well documented before they take off. A previous poster as stated when a heli has to make an emergency landing its pretty much a vertical descent they dont have too much forward momentum so their options are limited.

[SteveW]

Worst case is when a helicopter is hovering, but if it has forward speed, then the glide angle is typically between 3 and 4 feet of forward flight per foot of altitude.

I've been up in light aircraft and helicopters and felt safer in the helicopter (I know statistically it isn't), as in case of engine failure, although you can't glide as far, you can make a landing in a pretty confined space and so have more choices overall.

I've had one pilot disengage the engine clutch and carry out an autorotation into a field - I enjoyed that.

SteveW

[Graham.]

The park near me does have a helipad. A few slight problems on the day this was captured

To be fair, in a dire emergency the pilot is likley to be aiming to land two or three hundred meters to the North, even if the pad was clear.

[Andy Burns]

The local brewery has (had? it looks like it might be decommissioned) one, convenient for the nearby police HQ.

[Nightjar]

In most cases, it would simply fly back to base. The Police use twin engine helicopters because they can usually fly them to safety, even if one engine fails. In the case of the Glasgow crash, it seems likely that it was something fairly catastrophic that went wrong, such as a gearbox seizure.

Only useful if you can guarantee that it won't be occupied by dog walkers or kids playing football when it was needed. It would also need to be lit at night.

If the local helicopter needs to land, the Police simply cordon off an area.

Sports ground floodlights are fairly consistently placed and at night they make excellent landmarks.

That is for airliners, which need to have very much higher standards of safety than other aircraft types. There are light twins where the only difference from a single engine aircraft if one engine stops is that you get slightly longer to decide where you are going to try to land.

Colin Bignell

[charles]

Really? The Engineer in charge of one BBc transmitting site rang a nearby RAF base to suggest the pilots stopped pLaying "footsie" with the guy wires. "What guy wires?". At another site, an F111 lost part of a wing = sliced off by a guy wire.

[Brian Gaff]

Far as I'm aware they do have a list of 'safe areas' and most if not all helicopters which are used over built up areas are twin engined. Even mostly twin gearboxes, which makes this incident very worrying indeed.

Of course if they did hit anything airborne with a rotor, this would not be a survivable event any more than any other catastrophic failure. We hope to hear the outcome on this one and it has to worry the Police and ambulance fraternity. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

All two wheeled vehicles, pushbikes and motor driven, I mean too unstable at low speeds mate. Deep sea diving suits with one single point of failure, i.e., the air supply.

In fact nobody would do anything much at all I suppose.

PS I had the gas taken out of my house. However I'll probably be killed byy elecricution or cold when the power fails. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

At least those choppers do not need a tail rotor. Was it not in Australia where a news chopper took a bird out with its tail rotor which of course also took out the rotor and it was thus doomed.

Brian