On Friday in Phoenix, two television station helicopters crashed into each other, then crashed to earth and burned. The news copters were following an escaping bad guy, wanted by the police, doing the live eye in the sky thing that television stations love.
KTVK and KNXV both lost their pilots and their videographers in the crashes. One of the reporters was covering the ground chase live to air when the collision happened. This is tragic in a number of ways, not the least being for the various families of the dead.
The part that I find more surprising is that it hasn’t happened sooner. Major metro stations in the US know that live footage of police chases, fires, floods and so on are ratings grabbers of the first order. Helicopters and small aircraft have been used as traffic report platforms for decades, then with the advent of microwave downlinks, as Live-Eye-In-The-Sky, bringing you pictures as they happen.
About a decade ago, as satellite links became affordable and stabilized camera mounts more common, the live-eye evolved further, using some very nifty technology to deliver dropout-free, gyro-stabilized, gen-locked pictures to the dazed eyes of viewers at home. The more famous live-eye shots have been the OJ Simpson low-speed Bronco chase: Riot coverage from LA. The three days of coverage of Hurricane Katrina by pool reporters in New Orleans. I’m leaving out the car chase action that happens daily in LA, as the news departments fight for ratings.
By definition, helicopters are 10,000 highly-stressed aluminum parts flying in close formation. Helicopters do not naturally fly: You use horsepower and rotors to force the thing to go in the air. If you lose horsepower, you fall. Technically, you can auto-rotate to a landing as long as you have some forward speed, a minimum of 300 feet of height and a lot of room to decide where you’re going to engage in a controlled crash. Losing a main rotor, or a tail rotor means gravity and physics take over immediately and it will probably kill you.
Fixed wing airplanes naturally glide, as long as you have enough forward speed and some height, even a 767 will glide. Just ask the passengers of G-GAUN (cn22520/47) the Air Canada Gimli Glider. As long as most of the airframe is intact, fixed wing aircraft of almost any size will glide at least for a while. Eventually, the same physics and gravity take over. At the end of the day, helicopter or fixed-wing, as long as you walk away from the landing, it was a successful flight.
Where it goes wrong is the control room, or the news producer pushing for more, closer, better, more striking news footage: The pressure on the pilots and the videographers to get right into it for better coverage.
Three or four helicopters, fighting gravity, the machine, uplink connections, the sun, hydro wires, towers, building, updrafts, downdrafts, other copters’ rotor wash, other air traffic and still trying to follow a terrified felon being chased by the cops, (in a helicopter too), at low altitude and not much forward speed, means the odds are stacked up against each news copter. Add one small mechanical failure, or even just a little mechanical bobble and it is all over.
The issue is really why do we feel it necessary to see, up close and personal from the live-eye in the sky, a car chase, or smoke billowing from a garbage fire? We know the news stations will cover it, using all the resources they have at their command, including helicopters. Each station fights to give the viewer the most impressive pictures of the action. On more than a few occasions, the Michael Jackson motorcade to the police station comes to mind, the news copters seem to miss each other by mere feet. I don’t care how skilled these pilots are, that’s pushing your luck to get the ‘story’, such as it was.
The other side of the problem is the pilot in command. The pilot is the person ultimately responsible for the safe operation of the aircraft. With extraordinary pressures on him or her from the newsroom, they can sometime be persuaded into making decisions that they might not want to make.
I’ve shot commercials and industrial films from several helicopters, small aircraft and even hot-air balloons. Before unpacking cameras and gear, we would have a safety meeting, often at my insistence. My rule was always the pilot decides and I said it out loud. If they feel safe doing what I suggest, then we’ll do it, but they can call it off at any time for any reason. I have survived one emergency auto-rotate landing in a Hughes 500. I never want to do that again as it almost as bad as falling down a flight of stairs.
The pilot, a year later, in the same aircraft, was killed in a shoot for a television station in Hull. He nailed some hydro wires on a high speed pass over a lake. The Transportation Safety Board brought the tape to where I worked, to find out what happened.
You saw the copter doing a fast, low pass (called gettin’ the skids damp in the slang of the day) over a beautiful lake and heard a very distinct sound when the wires hit the engine nacelle and turned it all into a spray of aluminum parts. people and camera equipment. There wasn’t enough time for the four occupants to say "Merde!" when the tape ended abruptly.
What happened in Phoenix is utterly predictable. If the NTSB does some digging, they’ll probably find the control room, or the director was calling for some really close shots of the perp being chased. They’ll probably find that three or four helicopters, at a low level, in hot conditions (not as much lift from the air) doing weird acrobatics to keep the camera on the subject, resulted in two of them coming together, showering parts, people and fuel over Steele Indian School Park in Phoenix.
Where we fail as a society, is letting television stations feed us this madness. It isn’t news. Mikey Jackson driving to court does not need five copters in the air, covering every mile. Paris Hilton does not require air cover to get to prison. Wildfires are smoke, smoke and more smoke with the occasional flame outbreak. Heck, just replay the same footage from last season and we’ll never know the difference.
The Media gives us what we want and if that’s live eye footage of the trivial, the unimportant and the merely titillating, then this will happen again.
RoadDave 