The pilot didn’t panic. The drone was directly in front of the helicopter.
I've gone through some helicopter safety training for SAR, and been picked up and dropped off by a UH-60. The pilots spend a lot of time briefing us on all of the things they are nervous about, and there are a lot of things that they're nervous about. All of our gear has to be tight and secure. Don't have our trekking poles on our backs (common). Some of it is about passenger safety -- where and how to approach depending on the situation -- and some of it is about the safety of the craft.
When doing a hoist by air, there are a lot of things that can go wrong and many of them will be fatal for the helicopter. We have a tag line that is used to stabilize a litter as it's being lifted, because rotor wash makes the litter spin dizzyingly (and here's what that looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msw31_dw7hE), and occasionally the tag line or something else will get loose and end up in one of the rotors and then a lot of people have a really bad day (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyuQ-XG7LbY -- the pilot here is a total badass).
The areas around, under, and above the main rotor are completely unpredictable and if the drone ends up in that and gets bounced into the fragile tail rotor, it could kill the pilot and student. The pilot knows nothing about the skill or knowledge of the drone operator; putting the helicopter on the ground is safe and prudent in that situation.
I have flown a helicopter on numerous occasions. One does not want to be surprised by things while doing that.
Could an experienced pilot keep his cool in this situation? Of course. Is the pilot’s brain a huge factor here? Absofuckinglutely.
But yes, if you’re just doing hovering exercises, there’s absolutely no reason not to just put it down if you see something unsafe nearby — you’re usually only ~10ft above the ground anyway.
Edit: I was expecting it to stop twisting and begin turning the other way, like string that I've played with, but it just ... never did. I can't imagine the tension that would put into the cable.
Assuming they connected it in the usual way, it would have been twisting, but not so much tangling. It might tangle once everything was on the ground and the tension was off the line. I don't know what the hoist line material is; I'd guess a kernmantle of some kind but I'm probably wrong.
You could argue that we should now train pilots to carefully pause and consider whether the thing they are about to hit is safe to hit. But for that, you'd have to show that the additional reaction time in avoiding collisions is really net safer. And if you did argue that, you couldn't judge the current pilots by your proposed new standard.
For those interested, by the way, in really thinking through accident retrospectives, I strongly recommend Sidney Dekker's "Field Guide to Human Error": https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error...
I read it just out of curiosity, but it turned out to be very applicable to software development.
Whoever the operator of the drone is, they are wholly responsible for illegal operation of their drone and the results thereafter.
Absolutely correct in a general sense.
In this story though, it’s not exactly clear who is at fault though with the details given.
- Helicopter was doing hovering drills
This means they were below 400ft
- Crash occurred in a remote area per article
This implies they were not near an airport, but it’s inconclusive based on the article alone. It’s entirely possible the DJI pilot was flying on his/her own land.
- both instructor and student said they saw the drone
Doesn’t indicate how far away the drone was however. I have a feeling though either the quadcopter pilot was either flying FPV (aka in violation of the line of sight rule) or wasn’t giving appropriate clearance to the helicopter, so ultimately they could partially be at fault.
Overall, it seems to me the root cause was the instructor overreacting. The instructor should’ve landed the helicopter if they didn’t have situational awareness enough to know a tree was nearby.
Replace “drone” with any other object in the air (say a kite flown by a kid or a bird or whatever) and would you have the same “blame goes to the other party, not instructor” perspective?
Not long ago, a Hydro One helicopter crashed and killed four people after a tool bag came loose and hit the tail rotor [1]. It's likely that this tool bag was significantly heavier than a drone, but if you're keeping incidents like that one in mind while flying and you see a drone in your path, it's probably rational to try to evade it immediately rather than trying to decide in real-time whether the drone is massive enough to cause damage.
[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2017/12/21/unsecured-too...
We will probably end up with the 400 feet AGL banned for aviation, and 300 feet AGL limit for recreational flying, and 100 feet of buffer.
General aviation pilots violate regulations all the time without being disciplined, and kill people once in a while, and it's a bit hard to put all the burden on the recreational remote controlled aircraft pilots.
here is a guy with a cool head on the situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0gOxuyr438
I think that's a pretty sensible set of rules, but it turns gray in situations like this helicopter hover training one where civil aviation pilots have a legitimate need to be under 300ft AGL for a length of time. My intuition (and this is what I was trying to push with my comments around the collisions in the article never affecting an airframe) was that drone pilots need to be better educated around staying the hell away from other flying vehicles (which I treated as a given, probably leading to downvotes) but also that helicopter pilots will need to be trained to treat drones like geese and not to react as strongly as this pilot did, since, to your point, it's going to be hard to put the entire burden on RC pilots.
However, based on the other comments in this thread, this seems like a very controversial stance for the HN crowd, and I do sympathize with the argument from the helicopter pilot in this thread that they've already got enough on their plate without needing to handle mental interrupts from other junk flying around. The proliferation of recreational drones with terrible inexperienced pilots is definitely a problem we'll have to handle in the coming years.