Helicopter Ditches Off NL

[EagleSmack]

You are absolutely right Eagle. Having the engines mounted high under the rotors pretty well guarantees that the helicopter will flip over after a crash landing. The resulting confusion, disorientation don't help, not to mention that the helicopter will soon be headed for the bottom.
My comment about the lifejacket beacons came from my time in the airforce. An earlier news report talked about a new search for the passengers and I wondered if modern lifejackets had anything to help the searchers. My airforce experience was close to forty years ago.;-)

Oh it is going to flip... gravity assures that and when you are flipped in the water disorientation will get you. They taught us to grab onto a reference point close to the exit you plan to swim to. No matter what your head is telling you you had to trust your left or right.

I know that homing beacons and salt water activated strobes are part of a fixed wing pilots gear. When I was on an aircraft carrier an A-6 went down at night off the coast of Spain. Initially both pilots were thought to be lost in the crash. The next morning however a pilot was found in his raft suffering from severe hypothermia as it was winter. He was minus all his survival gear and it was a mystery as it was missing from his locker meaning he had it on. The only thing they could come up with was that it was ripped from his body during the ejection. He succumbed to hypothermia and never regained consiousness to say what happened.

 

[EagleSmack]

We had beacons with a range of about two miles and a flight suit that gave you ten seconds to get from an icy ocean into a one-man-dingy - usually on a pitching sea. I have no idea at what altitude these people flew - but five thousand feet gives you about thirty seconds to prepare in free-fall.

And a crash from 5K' has to be a pretty nasty impact.

 

[#juan]

I know that homing beacons and salt water activated strobes are part of a fixed wing pilots gear. When I was on an aircraft carrier an A-6 went down at night off the coast of Spain. Initially both pilots were thought to be lost in the crash. The next morning however a pilot was found in his raft suffering from severe hypothermia as it was winter. He was minus all his survival gear and it was a mystery as it was missing from his locker meaning he had it on. The only thing they could come up with was that it was ripped from his body during the ejection. He succumbed to hypothermia and never regained consiousness to say what happened.

Ejecting into a five hundred mile an hour(or more) wind can do all sorts of strange things. I never used an ejection seat on anything but a practice tower, but there were all kinds of stories about guys who had lost helmets, most of their flight suit, boots, etc, during ejection. Ejection seats have come a long way since the sixties...Thank God!