On the afternoon of March 3, 2000, a helicopter operated by a Miami television station crashed in a suburban neighborhood, killing the pilot and the photographer who was with him. According to early press reports, a witness on the ground had seen the tail rotor "snap off" as the helicopter performed some sort of maneuver. Readers of those reports who distrusted flying machines in general and helicopters in particular must have felt confirmed in their doubts. It would later emerge that the helicopter was innocent; as is most often the case, human actions led to the disaster.
The helicopter was a McDonnell-Douglas MD-600N, an eight-seater with a six-blade main rotor. Nicknamed "NOTAR" (NO TAil Rotor), it uses a fan and louvers in a thick tail boom, rather than the conventional propeller, to control yaw. Thus, the witness's account of the tail rotor snapping off referred, actually, to the tail boom, because there was no tail rotor as such. The tail boom did, in fact, come to earth a couple of hundred feet away from the main wreckage.
It transpired, as the National Transportation Safety Board investigated the accident, that the pilot was fond of pushing the helicopter outside its approved flight envelope. He had described to a friend how he would make a fast pass down a runway and then pull up into a steep climb. As speed bled off, he would yaw 180 degrees, like an airplane performing a hammerhead turn. Control forces in the ensuing recovery were "extremely high," he said -- not surprising, since the MD-600N's controls are quite stiff even in normal maneuvering.
Two chopper pilots who flew for other television stations reported that it was the pilot's custom to arrive at a news scene low and stop by pulling the nose of the helicopter up to a "near-vertical" attitude and then pushing over into a hover at the top of the resulting zoom climb. He would fly sideways at high speed; he would pitch the helicopter into an unusually nose-low attitude when transitioning from hover to forward flight. Employees of the station that operated the accident helicopter did not confirm these accounts. One cameraman, however, related a conversation that he had with the photographer who died in the accident. The photographer expressed his concern about flying with the pilot, because his technique was needlessly "aggressive." He would enter a steep bank immediately after lifting off the dolly. He didn't mind the pilot doing it a couple of times, the photographer said, but after seven or eight times it got "annoying," and the photographer had told the pilot so.
An attorney who was receiving helicopter instruction at the Tamiami Airport (TMB) on the day of the accident gave a similar account. "There he is in another one of those 60-degree banks!" said his instructor when they met on the ramp.
"I ... saw Sky 6 on a heading of about 180 at an altitude of about 200 feet," the attorney recalled. "[It] was in a bank of at least 60 degrees ... The bank was so steep that the disk was almost a perfect circle, and Sky 6 was dropping -- losing altitude at a high rate of speed. It soon disappeared from view, blocked from our sight by buildings. My initial reaction was that it was too low to recover from such a high rate of descent and must have crashed. When there was no crash or explosion, however, I said something like, 'He is really hot dogging it!' My thought at the time was that the pilot must have a death wish, or he was perhaps demonstrating the capabilities of the aircraft to someone. However it struck me that 200 feet above the center of TMB was not a good place to demonstrate such a dangerous maneuver ... At this point [the instructor] said that he had seen Sky 6 earlier in the day performing some various maneuvers and that Sky 6 [had] passed very fast and very low over his head. He said something about 'getting a haircut.' "
Later that day, they learned that Sky 6 had crashed. According to the attorney, his instructor remarked that the accident might have been due to the pilot rolling the helicopter or getting it inverted, and that he had done it before. In a subsequent interview, however, the instructor said that his idea that the pilot had rolled or inverted the helicopter came from "scuttlebutt going on around the airport."
Sky 6 had been dispatched to cover the collision of a train and a bus, and was returning to Tamiami when the accident occurred. It had joined up with another helicopter and flown alongside it for a little while, eastbound at 600 feet climbing to 800, as the two pilots chatted. Another news chopper pilot on the frequency heard the conversation. As it ended, the pilot of Sky 6 told the other pilot to keep flying eastbound, and added, "Watch this!"
Both the pilot and the passenger in the second helicopter did watch, as instructed, and they saw the inflight breakup occur. Their accounts of it differed mainly in the magnitudes of the pitch angles they reported, the passenger's estimates being consistently larger than the pilot's.
Sky 6 pulled away from the other helicopter, pitching down 15 degrees (pilot) or 45 degrees (passenger). The helicopter then pulled up into a 30-degree nose-up attitude before pitching up further to 70 degrees (pilot) or past vertical (passenger). It then yawed to the left, started to slide backwards, and the nose began to pitch down. At this point, the tail boom separated.
