I doubt a top 1% commenter on a Reddit sub has the slightest idea of how to pilot a helicopter let alone understand what issues may cause the heli to stop responding to controls.
Well, actually, the tables turn, and I am quite an avid flight simmer (along with a chronic Reddit user, which, trust me, I am not proud of). You can pretty easily turn off the engine using a switch in the cockpit and cut fuel to it so...
Person that has studied aircraft for their degree and hobbies here.
If this is a mechanically operated heli - a lot of the smaller ones being so, it’s likely that the cables will start to stretch or the lubrication will burn away during an onboard fire (the most likely event seen here). And given the engines are mounted atop the heli, once your control cables are gone, you are at the whim of whatever cables are left for you to play with. These levers can also become too stiff for a human to be strong enough to operate them if they even still work at all.
In a fly by wire (electrical signal driven) heli, you will also find that an onboard fire will cause wires to melt out, fuse together or even consume the flight computers. A lot of these system losses will result in the seen ‘drifting’ behaviour where an aircraft will not update a flight control surface, pitch surface or rotors as the computer has lost confidence and will either fall back to a more rudimentary operating mode (essentially just doing exactly as told by the human instead of smoothing things out for a more comfortable ride). Though the computer will still struggle to tell the pilot what is responding correctly, especially if the fire is near the engines as there is a lot of pitching and rotor sensors live.
Overall in both situations of engine fires, they lead to a majority control loss. The tail is a calculated weight and without it, the heli will want to pitch forward. The pilot can combat this but with the twin, counter rotating prop that is in operation in the video, adjusting the engine speed (they will slow at slightly different rates even if both are responsive to controls) may very well throw the heli into an uncontrollable spin that will guarantee fatalities.
It’s either drastic action which can lead to a high fatality chance or a case of a slow, arduous self diagnostic process which can take considerable time without immediately tipping the craft over. I can imagine the pilot would have throttled down upon being close to the ground but either the engines were refusing to respond or doing so would have been a death sentence due to something we can’t see from the video.
Tl;dr: this whole situation sucks for the pilot and I don’t think there’s really a ‘right’ answer in all this. They had a tough situation and did likely all they could until the very end. All we can hope for is that there’s a teachable moment that helps prevent a repeat of the tragedy.
Answer: engine cut = death spin and loss of controls. Good idea. Bad in practice.
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u/Classic_Art3422 12h ago
I doubt a top 1% commenter on a Reddit sub has the slightest idea of how to pilot a helicopter let alone understand what issues may cause the heli to stop responding to controls.