NC Highway Patrol pilot tried to land twice before crashing on Tryon Road, NTSB says
The pilot of a State Highway Patrol helicopter that crashed while attempting to land at the agency’s hangar last fall had aborted two earlier landing attempts, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
Both times, the pilot experienced what’s known as “vortex ring state,” the lack of lift that can occur when a helicopter descends too quickly while not moving forward. In both cases, the pilot recovered and gained altitude.
On the third attempt, the pilot experienced the same lack of lift, but at 300 feet above the ground “there was not enough altitude to successfully complete the same recovery maneuver,” according to the NTSB’s report, released this month.
The helicopter rapidly lost altitude and hit the tops of several trees. That caused the main rotor blade to contact the tail rotor drive shaft, and the aircraft yawed to the right, the report says. The pilot then crash landed on Tryon Road, just outside the Highway Patrol’s training grounds.
The pilot, Trooper B.K. Jones, was not injured. The NTSB report said Jones had logged 1,878 hours of flying time, including 101 hours on the Bell 206 A, the type he was flying when it crashed about 2:15 p.m. on Nov. 8.
The crash occurred on a Sunday, and the helicopter did not hit any vehicles on Tryon Road.
Jones had been flying about an hour and a half on a training flight and had a passenger on board for the first two attempts to land at the Highway Patrol hangar, according to the NTSB. He successfully landed nearby to let the passenger off to reduce the weight of the helicopter before making his third attempt to land at the hangar, according to the report.
Jones told investigators that there were no “mechanical malfunctions or failures of the helicopter that would have precluded normal operation,” according to the report.
The helicopter was the second to crash at the State Highway Patrol training center off Tryon Road in the last three years.
In June 2018, another Highway Patrol helicopter pitched over on its side as it was trying to take off, resulting in minor injuries to the pilot and a passenger. NTSB investigators in that case determined that the pilot had failed to unhook the helicopter’s right skid from the hydraulic device that moved the aircraft out of the hangar, pulling the aircraft over as he tried to lift off.
In both cases, the Bell helicopters, both built around 1970, were a total loss.