Is It Better To Be Lucky Or Good? Yes

Is it better to be lucky than good? False choice. Cover the board and aim for both lucky and good, although this philosophical mobius strip leads to the inevitable conclusion that skill has a lot to do with making luck. I’m blathering on about this because just six months ago I wrote a blog explaining how 2021 was a bad year for me personally with regard to fatal accidents. Four friends or acquaintances died in crashes.

This year is not going much better. In the past month, two friends have emailed reporting the death in crashes of people they knew. Both were previously certificated pilots coming back into flying, possibly because Basic Med made that possible. I’m not casting aspersions on that program, just noting that expansion of the pilot pool has always had a price in blood and that may still be so.

Circling back to luck is the video we’re running this week of an accident that occurred at California’s Cable Airport in January 2022. The lucky part accrues from the fact that any pilot who finds himself in a 90-degree bank at 30 feet with no roll control survives at the whims of gravity and flat dirt that’s not too hard. (The video was posted by Aviation Safety Network.)

The particulars of the accident are that the pilot of a Cessna 120 approached Cable’s Runway 24. On short final, he encountered rotor wash from a Huey helicopter operated by the local sheriff’s department that caused an uncontrolled roll to the right at low altitude. The airplane struck in that attitude—nose first—and pirouetted into a slide that just missed the end of a hangar block. The pilot sustained minor injuries, but the airplane was seriously trashed.

I read a lot of accident reports and about one in 50 turn out to be, well, really interesting. This one was one of those, by dint of the pilot having attached his own detailed analysis and statement of what happened that lends far more detail than the NTSB’s minimal analysis. In toto, with the pilot’s report, it’s possible to learn something from this; without it, not so much.

If the pilot’s statement was accurate, there were two helicopters operating at the airport, neither of which observed recommended procedures for the airport. One of the helos crossed in front of the Cessna without announcing its intentions, according to the pilot’s report. He was in the midst of applying go-around power when he encountered the rotor wash and lost control.

The pilot provided his own historical analysis by noting there aren’t many such accidents in the database. Is it because pilots know to give helicopters a wide berth or because medium to heavy helicopters don’t mix that much with light aircraft? I’d guess more the latter than the former. A Huey—think Bell 204/205—grosses around 9500 pounds so in a slow taxi hover, it’s pushing a lot of air and making a lot of local turbulence.

But a big heavy lift helo like a CH-53 (46,000 pounds) or a CH-47 Chinook (50,000 pounds) raises a hell of a ruckus. These aren’t commonly seen at civil airfields, but they’re far from unheard of, either. I once saw a pair of CH-53s do low passes at First Flight Airport in North Carolina. They show up unannounced at other airports, too. My former Connecticut homebase, Waterbury-Oxford, got regular visits from Blackhawks (13,000 pounds) flying from the nearby Sikorsky factory.

I guess I knew to give them plenty of separation, but if I knew you’re supposed to be at least three rotor diameters away—according to AC 90-23G—I’ve forgotten it. Also, in a slow hover taxi, a helicopter disturbs the air a little above it, too. And even on the ground, three rotor diameters may not be enough. Here’s another rotor wash encounter that didn’t result in an accident, but nonetheless caused alarm.

So to be honest, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have blundered into the same situation the pilot at Cable did. The helo was crossing his path, so it wasn’t like the wake should be persistent. But now, we all know not to do that.

One aspect of this story that doesn’t appear in the NTSB records is the chaos helicopters sometimes cause on the ground that don’t result in accidents or reportable incidents. Not to generalize too broadly here, but helicopter pilots are sometimes oblivious to the minor issues they cause on the ground when hover taxiing. I witnessed one here at Venice when a Jet Ranger taxied by a line of transient aircraft—not all of which were tied down—and blew a couple out of position, although no damage was done. The mother of all downwash terror is the V-22 Osprey. In this 2010 incident, 10 people were injured thanks to a crew oblivious to what was under the downwash. This one was even more spectacular and completely destroyed a hospital’s emergency helipad.   

In my flying career I have often left an airplane secured only with chocks while taking a lav or lunch break. It would have taken, what, an extra minute or two to tie it down? I don’t expect a V-22 to show up, but then again, neither did that hospital. Like it or not, we’re on our own out there and we can’t count on fixed or rotor wing pilots to always do the right thing.