Jan. 27, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
13:23
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain. | |
| I'm on the line with Joe, an experienced helicopter pilot who contacted me yesterday with some thoughts about the terrible crash that occurred just yesterday with Kobe Bryant and a number of other people in a helicopter in California. | |
| Thank you, Joe, for taking the time today. | |
| Well, thanks for having me on. | |
| So you've been flying helicopters for a couple of years, and I'm really fascinated by this. | |
| I actually spent a lot of time in helicopters when I worked in the bush up north in Canada. | |
| They're a little alarming. | |
| They're very easily prone to wind, to downdrafts, and they're pretty crappy in fog. | |
| But I wonder if you could help people understand who've not spent much time in helicopters Just what kind of risks were going on in California yesterday when Kobe Bryant's pilot took off in fog so thick? | |
| They said you could barely see your hand in front of your face, and even the LAPD helicopters were grounded. | |
| Yeah, well, your guess is about as good as mine for now. | |
| All the details are really sketchy. | |
| There's not much out there yet, but yeah, from what I can see, it was just poor decision-making going out into the fog that thick. | |
| What is it that makes helicopters so particularly prone to lack of visibility dangers? | |
| Well, with helicopters, you're usually flying low level. | |
| So you're usually about a thousand feet above the ground and below that. | |
| So you got problems you can run into hillsides, like what happened there. | |
| You got power lines, trees. | |
| There's all sorts of dangers flying that low level when you can't see what you're doing. | |
| How much can you rely on instrumentation when you're used to that kind of visibility? | |
| Of course, you know, there's this big giant bubble often at the front of helicopters and so on. | |
| It's a lot of visibility, which you need, as you say, because you're flying kind of low. | |
| But how easy is it to just rely on instruments when you're flying in that lack of visibility situation? | |
| Right. So it depends on what you're used to flying. | |
| There's two flight rules. | |
| There's visual flight rules and instrument flight rules. | |
| Most helicopter pilots fly under what's called visual flight rules, VFR. So you need to have visual contact with the ground when you're flying. | |
| So they're all used to looking outside and using visual references when they fly. | |
| When you get into those white-out situations and thick fog where you can't see, most guys aren't used to that. | |
| And, you know, you're trained in what to do, but if you don't use that training very often, you know, you can forget. | |
| You can get panicked. There's a lot of things that can go wrong. | |
| So when you make the decision to fly into fog, I assume that the decision has something to do with, well, I'm sure it's going to clear up. | |
| It's going to get better. | |
| It's probably just really local. | |
| And if you find out, like you fly into this kind of fog and you really can't see much of what's going on, if anything, and of course, you know, it could be condensation on the glass for all I know. | |
| So what are you supposed to do in that situation? | |
| Right. Well, they say you shouldn't take off to begin with if it's that bad. | |
| And I see the LAPD, they were grounded anyway, so it must have been pretty bad right from the airport. | |
| But if you choose to take off anyway, and it gets worse along your route, your best bet is always, always to turn around, to get out of the really bad stuff. | |
| Beyond that, you have a few options. | |
| You can either head straight back to the airport, which would probably be your best bet. | |
| Or if it starts to close around you, try and find somewhere to land if that's an option to you. | |
| But continuing forward through, that's a poor decision. | |
| And how easy is it to just get turned around? | |
| Like I'm thinking sort of when I was out working in the bush, if it was really foggy and so on, it's really easy to just get turned around to not really know where you are. | |
| And that's just like two dimensions without including height. | |
| So what happens when you have virtually no visibility? | |
| How easy is it to get disoriented? | |
| Yeah, it's extremely easy. | |
| I've gotten into it a little bit myself, just starting to get into some whiteouts. | |
| You turn around, but It's amazing, even for those few seconds, how quick you can get disoriented. | |
| You know, you can be diving down when you feel like you're climbing. | |
| Your airspeed can be all over the place. | |
| If you look at sat tracks of people that have crashed before due to low visibility, they're all over the place just before they crash. | |
| Well, there was a bit of a spaghetti trail with this helicopter as well. | |
| So it takes off. They circled, I think, four or five times an area near the L.A. Zoo. | |
| And I assume that's, what, waiting for the fog to clear or waiting for visibility to improve or just get some kind of visual cue as to where you are. | |
| And then have you sort of looked into what was going on near the end? | |
| Because, man, to hit the side of that hill at 176 miles an hour, that is... | |
| That is freaky fast for a helicopter, as far as I know. | |
| And again, it's all pure speculation, but what situations could possibly arise where you're going, what is that? | |
| Is that above the rated speed of the helicopter? | |
| I mean, that seems crazy fast to me. | |
| Yeah, I just did a quick Google search yesterday. | |
| He was flying an S-76. | |
| It's a large helicopter, and by the looks of it, their VNE max speed is about 155 knots. | |
| So he was going well over that. | |
| Which means you would have been diving into that hill. | |
| Again, I think it was just disorientation. | |
| It's pretty easy to get into a dive when you're not used to flying instrument. | |
| Well, and I've got to imagine that... | |
| Yeah. | |
| But when things start to go awry, you do suddenly realize that you're, you know, flying around in a giant metal death machine being powered by explosive gasoline particles and you're a thousand feet above the ground. | |
| There is a sudden vulnerability that I think can cause real panic, maybe not in the pilot, of course, maybe in the passengers more so. | |
| Right. And a lot of that comes down to training. | |
| Yeah. And I don't know what this guy's experience was. | |
| Maybe he's used to instrument flying. | |
| I don't know. But if you're not used to it and you get into that situation, it can be deadly real quick. | |
| It's extremely disorienting. | |
| And I've seen his trail there, too. | |
| I mean, his airspeed was all over the place. | |
| He was up to 150 knots, down to 50, climbing, descending. | |
| He was very disoriented. | |
| Now, when it comes to being a pilot, I know that you do a lot of crop work, but when it comes to being a pilot, I've certainly seen this when we would hire helicopters and airplanes up north in Ontario and Manitoba and Saskatchewan, | |
| that sometimes the professional judgment of the pilot was leaned upon, to put it as Yeah, | |
| 100%. Most of the time when you make a poor decision like that, it's due to either pressure from your passengers or your boss. | |
| I don't know how it is in the States. | |
| There are no up around here. | |
| It's pretty hard to get a job flying. | |
| So usually the pilot's pretty happy to do whatever the boss says to keep that job. | |
| Well, and I've got to think with the status and probably decent or good pay from a Kobe Bryant gig, it's pretty hard. | |
| Like if Kobe Bryant's saying there, you know, make it happen or I'll find someone who will. | |
| Not that I know. He said that and we'll never know, I'm sure. | |
| But I can see that being quite a bit of pressure for a pilot who wants to keep a pretty sweet gig with a lot of status. | |
| Right. I think that probably has a lot to do with it. | |
| You get a sweet job like that and You're probably going to do everything you can to keep that job. | |
| I'd imagine it was getting paid extremely well to do what is really a pretty easy job. | |
| Well, and this is the frustrating thing, too, is that It's an hour and a half drive and it's a Sunday morning. | |
| It's not like you're stuck in L.A. traffic at 5.15 in the afternoon on a weekday. | |
| And so to me, if the fog looks that bad and, you know, we've all had this in Canada, right? | |
| You pull out of your driveway and it's like freezing rain and you're sliding all over the place and it's foggy and you're like, well, I can postpone this drive. | |
| I don't care how important it is. | |
| I can postpone this drive. So we all sort of have that experience. | |
| So give me the comparison about what might ground a helicopter. | |
| I know it's different up here in Canada. | |
| Probably it's different in Canada than it is in the States. | |
| But in Canada, what are the guidelines for visibility and flying? | |
| Yeah, so up here, it depends on what airspace you're in. | |
| It's between one and three mile visibility is what you need to fly legally. | |
| I don't know what it is down there. | |
| I'd imagine it's either the same or very similar. | |
| And, you know, they say don't take off in a known icing or low visibility conditions. | |
| If you know it's going to be like that along your route, just don't take off. | |
| So you're saying a mile, you have to have a mile visibility in order to take off. | |
| Now you said legally, what does that mean? | |
| Yeah, that's the regulation set out by Transport Canada. | |
| Okay, so if you do fly, because, you know, for me, when you say legally, it's like, okay, well, you can't fly then if you don't have at least a mile visibility. | |
| So I guess the question is then, I mean, if the LAPD is grounded, I don't know if everybody knew that the LAPD helicopters were grounded when the Kobe Bryant helicopter took off. | |
| But how do you get permission to leave when it's that thick? | |
| Is that just, hey, man, the guy knows what he's doing? | |
| Well, it depends. Again, I'm not exactly sure what the regulations are in the States. | |
| I'd assume it's similar, but who knows? | |
| It could have been three-mile visibility at the airport where he took off. | |
| Five miles up the road, it could be down to basically zero. | |
| It can change really quick. | |
| Right. So that's when you see the wall of fog and you have that decision point of do you press on or do you turn back? | |
| And, you know, gosh, I mean, just get in a car. | |
| It's an hour and a half drive. You know, it just seems – and it's a kid's – I think it was a kid's basketball game that he was trying to get to with the other kids and parents in the – I mean, you see if the visibility was decent at the airport, you see that wall of fog coming up. | |
| I mean, that would be, I guess, where the pilot says turn around. | |
| And, you know, that's where the ominous horror movie music, if it was in a movie, would start to come up. | |
| Right. And I'm not sure what the decision making process was there. | |
| And unfortunately, I don't think we'll ever know what was going through their minds. | |
| But I just I can't figure out why they would push through that. | |
| You know, if you start to run into that thick fog, why didn't they turn around? | |
| Well, you know, this is why I find this topic so fascinating, which is the best we can do in this kind of tragic situation is try and figure out the dominoes of decisions that occur with this kind of tragedy. | |
| It sort of reminds me of the JFK Jr. flight in which, again, it's not one thing that goes wrong, assuming there wasn't some catastrophic mechanical failure. | |
| And I don't think there's any indication of that. | |
| And I know that the helicopter has a very good safety record. | |
| I'm sure it was very, very well maintained. | |
| But what are the decisions that end up with this kind of catastrophe? | |
| Because, I mean, there certainly are accidents that happen in this world. | |
| But there are decisions that you make that raise the possibility of this kind of disaster. | |
| And of course, most of us aren't negotiating with private helicopter pilots, but we drive cars and do other things that can increase or decrease our risk. | |
| And boy, where we can learn the lessons of avoidability, that to me is the best we can extract from this kind of mess. | |
| Well, exactly. It's a sad situation, and I hope everyone can learn something from it. | |
| And like you said, it's usually a string of events that lead up to an accident. | |
| It's never one decision that does it. | |
| It's a string of things that get there. | |
| So who knows? I don't know. | |
| Maybe they were running late. Maybe they were rushing. | |
| Passenger pressure. I don't know exactly what it was. | |
| But I have a feeling all those were factors in it anyway. | |
| All right. Well, listen, Joe, I really, really appreciate your time today. | |
| Thanks for the insight. | |
| And I guess we'll all keep our eyes peeled for what comes out. | |
| But I think as far as what was going on between Kobe Bryant, the other adults, and the pilot, we'll probably never know. | |
| But we can certainly speculate, and it's important to do so because it can help us avoid these kinds of messes in the future. | |
| So thanks for your time today. |
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