Helicopter Engine Fails at 2000 ft on Red Aerial shoot, and the camera is rolling.

[Michael Brennan]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for you comments.
These are all very good points but...

1. The camera was already capturing when the engine quit.
2. The camera and gyro mount where both securely tethered with just enough slack to maneuver the camera.
3. The floor of this small helicopter was occupied by the tail rotor pedals as well as the stub of the cyclic control. Best not to mess with them :]
4. I was too busy assisting the pilot looking for power lines and pulling the starter lever under my leg to worry about turning off the camera.

Given this extra information I would like to hear your thoughts on best practice in this scenario.

Dustin Veneman

Dustin, i didn't mean to infer to suggest to stop shooting, by putting it on the floor.
Keep the camera rolling for evidence, even if it is on the floor it
1/ provides a shot though chin window
2/ provides data for investigators on engine and rotor sounds.
3/ may provide other evidence to do with pilot actions during the emergency
4/it puts the potentially lethal weight of the camera between you and the ground at the moment of impact.
If the pedals were not removed for flight put the camera between your legs
In some cases a death spiral spin can be of such G force that you will not be able to control your arms.

Since you had a rig it is usually not possible to remove and stow the camera.
In respect to it being "securely tethered" as a guide the FAA want a seat mounting to withstand 16G forward impact.
What was it tethered too? Was the installation signed off by an engineer?
Bear in mind that having a local engineer sign off a home made rig on a particular aircraft for a particular flight (which I assume you did) does not confer the same approval as submitting design drawings to FAA or EASA that include crash worthiness and installation procedure data. EASA are demanding that if a monitor cant be certified to 20G then it should be able to be quickly stowed in an emergency and for take off and landing.
Legislation and day to day operational culture surrounding the temporary installations of cameras do not offer the degree of safe guards for camera operator safety as fully certified brackets and mounts. And fully certified brackets and mounts are only just beginning to include a decent measure of safe egress and crash worthiness.

Other advice

Carry a means of cutting cables which may entangle you in a crash.
Wear a helmet especially if your head is near a camera or rig, drop the visor on take off and landing.
If you must use a home made or dodgy rig, add extra features to improve its crash worthiness and your safe egress. Provide a means of securely locking the rig.
Consider 20gs.. will the means of securing the rig to the airframe support 20x the rig weight? generally speaking there are few parts of a helicopter so over designed that they can take an extra 100kg load. Such points are called hard points and they are few and far between. Even the D rings in the floor of the AS350 are not designed for a lot of weight yet I see them regularly used to ratchet down camera rigs.

Don't use a home made rig, more than one cameraman has been killed trapped by a home made rig in a ditching.
Most helicopter cockpit ceilings and door frames are not load bearing so a heavy landing with a rig suspended from a door frame or gutter can distort the roof leaving someone with a repair bill.

The simplest advice is not to film from the front seat of a light helicopter, period... and from a back seat as a last resort provided careful considered planning and acknowledgment of pilot and production of the flying gotchas associated with filming with the restriction of not being able to shoot from both forward left and right hand sides.

We recently lost two more film colleagues in a light helicopter crash (R44 with no stabilsied mount)... 5 souls in Australia alone, since this thread started.



Mike Brennan

 

[Arseni Tomkevich]

Thank god the camera is safe! :scared:

 

[David Cole]

1)...I trained 20 hours on one and had it fail on me while up practicing autorotations, funny enough. Barely cleared a treeline-sweaty palms for days. Only an R44 or more ironclad from here on out..

I had a magneto failure in an R22, 5 hours after getting my rotor add-on (inexperienced) with my mom onboard. Not an auto but certainly enough to command my attention. To this day, she has no idea we had a problem. Hope she doesn't read REDUSER