All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 30, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
56:27
Kobe Bryant: Final Flight Analysis
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine.
I hope you're doing well. So I'm here with John, who contacted me.
John has a staggering amount of experience as a pilot, 20 years, a year and a half, if I remember rightly, directly in the air, though I assume not all.
At the same time, John, thanks for taking the time today.
Yeah, thanks, Steph. How's it going? It's going well.
So do you want to give people a little bit of your background so that we can establish witness credibility before we dive into the actual Kobe Bryant flight?
Yeah, no problem.
So, I started flying in 2000, which puts me at just about 20 years flying.
Was a flight instructor, was a Gold Seal flight instructor with a CFI-II MEI, which means I could instruct instruments, multi-engine aircraft.
I've been with a commercial airline in the United States for 18 years.
Several years of that was working on the ramp and then about 15 years actually as a pilot.
I'm currently flying an Embraer 175 aircraft and I have a lot of experience in Burbank, Los Angeles, Orange County.
These are some of the routes that I've been flying for probably about 15 years.
So your expertise is fixed wing, not necessarily helicopter, but that doesn't have much to do with sort of the weather conditions and the visual versus instrumental flight rules and so on.
I just wanted to sort of point that out.
And what are the first things that you wanted people to understand or the biggest misconceptions about this crash that have been going on?
Yeah, so a lot of information that I've heard so far Which is really good, is a lot of private pilot people commenting.
And the mentality is a little bit different when this is your job every single day.
So I've heard people say that this was extreme weather.
I've heard people talking about, you know, the Los Angeles Police Department being grounded.
Just some misconceptions.
Whenever you're a professional about something, you can kind of pick out some of the discrepancies and the details.
But when your job is flying, it's a different attitude, for one, because you have a job to do.
But also this weather, even though it was low visibility, it wasn't extremely bad weather.
A thousand... Foot overcast with haze in Southern California at 9 in the morning is every day in the winter.
So that's pretty much normal.
So also I'd like to look at the weather at the airport they departed and what they were going to.
And we can look at some of the legalities.
And everything that this helicopter was doing was actually perfectly legal.
There was nothing... Yeah, so a couple of things that I've sort of picked up on in our previous conversation as well as stuff that I've looked up online.
The LAPD being grounded was not massively relevant because, of course, it's a distance away.
The weather can change quite a bit.
And also that there is no, as far as I understand it, there's no regulations that say you can't fly under certain conditions.
It's like, you know, we recommend and so on, but it's up to pilot skill and confidence to determine whether or not flights should have occurred.
Somebody who had flown with Kobe Bryant before said that he never felt pressured by Kobe Bryant to fly when conditions were unsafe.
So I wanted to sort of put that forward as well.
And yeah, so those are just a couple of things that I want to sort of bring up to speed of people who've been watching my previous presentations and so on.
Yeah, and also the mission is different.
When you're hired as a pilot to transport people for your job, that's just a different mission than what the L.A. Police Department would be doing.
If there's obscurations, their mission would probably be supporting police on the ground or search and rescue or something like that.
So if there's an overcast layer or mountain obscuration, it just might deter that mission.
That may have been the reason they were grounded.
I really don't know why they were grounded.
And they may have been out of a different airport, Los Angeles versus Orange County, for example.
Okay, great. So let's have a look here.
We don't necessarily have to go through this whole eight minutes, but this fellow Wolficorn has used Google Earth and some other technology to recreate this accident.
Flight path. And so here, this is, of course, this doesn't include the visibility issues that were going on at the time and in the location.
But, you know, first of all, the thing that strikes me here is it's always important to remember just how low these damn flights are.
You know, this kind of looks like you could reach down and trail your fingers on the treetops the way you would off the side of a canoe into a lake.
So they're low, right?
Yeah, very low. I mean, they operate just a few hundred feet off the ground.
I mean, probably somewhere between...
feet at the most.
There's no reason to go.
They can go pretty high though, right?
I know that's what he was doing near the end, was he went way up and then way down and was, I think, in a turn.
But this is sort of the origin of the flight here.
This was the flight path as a whole.
So down here, starting off in Irvine where the KSNA is, and I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about this flight pan, in particular this squiggle right above Los Angeles, where the pilot was in a holding pattern.
My understanding was that he was in a holding pattern because he was waiting maybe for the fog to clear, but I think he was actually given instructions for that from the air traffic control.
Exactly. Some people might be interested in some of these really...
Minutia details.
And so let's look at that.
So if we look at Orange County, KSNA, that's the identifier for the airport, that airspace is Class C or Class Charlie airspace.
And looking at the weather report, I can see right around nine o'clock when they took off, there was four miles of visibility.
The ceiling is 1,100 feet wide.
Overcast. And so when air traffic control reports a ceiling, that is a height AGL or above ground level.
So a thousand feet, 1,100 feet above the ground, there was an overcast layer.
So they were underneath this cloud layer.
The other reported weather in the area was mist and haze with very light winds, only about three miles an hour, which is considered calm winds.
To paint the picture when they took off, they're legal.
They have four miles visibility.
They're underneath an overcast layer, so it's going to be obscured.
The sun's going to be obscured.
And then they have mist and haze in the area, but all which is perfectly legal.
So transitioning through that airspace, they only need one mile and clear of clouds.
And a helicopter is actually even different.
Helicopter has a little bit lower visibility than an aircraft.
So as they were going up north, they had a transition through Los Angeles airspace, which is Class B airspace.
So we went from Class C to Class B. What's the difference there?
So Class B is going to be the highest restriction.
That's typically around the largest airports.
Think We're good to go.
Please, God, John, tell me that this is not the kind of maps that the pilots look at, because this just looks like the map of a schizophrenic having an epileptic attack.
I don't even know what to say about this, but I sort of feel like the rubes described on CNN of, like, the people who can't find Ukraine with the letter U and a picture of a crane.
I mean, this does not make me feel overly smart.
I'll tell you that right now.
So this is part of the complexity of being a pilot.
Now, this is what looks like a VFR chart.
This is what the pilot would have been navigating with, probably on an iPad device, some sort of an iPad device.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but they did actually, I listened to the report from, I think it was the investigators.
They did find an iPad.
They were hoping to get the flight route or flight path off that.
Yeah, and I'm really not sure because it just depends on if it was burned or damaged or if they can get it back.
But one of the other misconceptions is people think that there's a black box on an aircraft like this.
No. And there's not.
Yeah, there's not. So all they have to go off of is transponder report, which is going to tell you the airspeed and altitude and the path that that aircraft took, along with the...
Air traffic control recordings.
That's pretty much all they're going to have as far as raw data.
Right, right. Okay, so when he says here, we're starting to talk about VFR. So do you want to just give people a quick tour through IFR versus VFR? Sure.
So VFR means visual flight rules, which means you have to maintain your own separation or clearance from the terrain and also from other aircraft.
And You know, you can look online and see what the cloud clearance requirements, but they're anywhere from a mile to three miles, depending on the airspace and depending on the altitude you're operating with.
That's going to be a standard VFR day, but pretty much is saying that you can fly somewhere using roads in visual conditions.
This is exactly the type of flying that a helicopter would do.
It's very uncommon for a helicopter operation, at least like this one, To do any type of IFR flying.
Not that the aircraft isn't capable of it, it just would be outside of the value of flying an aircraft like that.
IFR means instrument flight rules, and that's what all the commercial Let's go into that a little bit with regards to airplanes versus helicopters, because it seems to me that airplanes would be much more IFR friendly because they're higher up.
There's a greater margin for error if you dip or your nose goes down because, you know, you might be 5,000 or 10,000 feet or more.
In the air, and it would seem like the big giant bubble that's in the front of most helicopters would seem specifically designed for that kind of visual flight, because if you do a dip and you're flying instruments only, you may only have a couple of seconds, as it turned out at the end of the flight, to correct.
And boy, that just seems a little dicey.
Exactly. That's just why a helicopter is typically a VFR aircraft.
I mean, If you're flying people within a valley like this from Orange County up to Burbank or wherever they were going, it doesn't make sense to file an IFR flight plan.
So yeah, most of these operations are going to be VFR. You can think of some operations, military or Coast Guard, that would be operating IFR to get in and out of airports that have visibility down where they couldn't see.
But yeah, you're correct.
The IFR environment is pretty much for fixed-wing aircraft.
And the analogy that I heard is that, of course, helicopter pilots would train for IFR, but it's kind of like if you were a black belt karate guy when you're 18 and then suddenly you get into a fight when you're 40, the question is, like, how nimble are you with your memory?
How much do you still have of that if it's been a while?
Right. And to get a job as a pilot for hire, you have to have an instrument rating, period.
You're not going to get hired without one, not in a job like this pilot had.
So that is just part, just like you're saying, that's part of going through the process of becoming a pilot, is that the second step after a private pilot certificate is that you would get an instrument certificate.
It just makes you more aware of the aircraft and the instrumentation on board so that you can navigate and control the airplane better.
And also, if you get into a situation where you lose contact with the ground, you know how to trust your instruments, maintain control of the aircraft and get into a situation or a safe situation.
So every commercial pilot will have an instrument rating.
And this was a very skilled helicopter pilot from what I've read to decades of experience.
He was also an instructor.
I mean, this is a guy you would imagine you could blindfold him and he could land you safely.
But, I mean, he was not any kind of rookie, which is kind of what you'd expect with a helicopter of this size and power and a passenger this important.
Yeah.
I saw that he had probably 8,000 plus hours.
I'm not sure how much of that was a helicopter.
I'm sure a good deal was.
But this guy had a lot of experience.
I read that he was a chief pilot at one point, or maybe even at the time for this operation.
So the guy was very, very experienced, for sure.
Right. Okay, so they're cruising along here, and this squiggle spaghetti trail that occurs...
Around Glendale and this golf course, what's going on here?
So this is what is called a holding pattern.
Just looking at it, it looks like he's doing figure eights.
Typically, with a fixed-wing aircraft, you're going to do an oval shape, either one direction or the other, either left turns or right turns.
Helicopters, I think they have different, you know, I have some notes here.
And some timestamps.
Bear with me for two seconds.
Yeah, no problem. And this is the part where my understanding of what had early been reported was that he was waiting for the fog to clear.
And, you know, I mean, I talked about it.
Does it make a whole lot of sense?
I don't know. If cruising around for a couple of minutes, it's not going to blow the fog away.
But this was something that he got instructions to do, right?
Yeah. So this is a little bit of inaccurate information.
He was not waiting for fog to clear.
If you listen to the tapes...
You can see that right around 27 minutes past the hour.
So maybe it was somewhere between 25 and 27 minutes past 9 o'clock.
They were told to hold outside.
He's requesting clearance into Burbank's Class Charlie airspace.
He's asking, hey, can I come into your airspace?
And Burbank says, hold outside.
I can't get you in my airspace yet.
I have a missed approach.
So what happened in Burbank, there's an aircraft, I don't know what type of aircraft it was, was attempting a landing at Burbank, and I have landed at this airport very many times.
It's one of the shortest runways that we land on.
It's very short, and the terminal is like a few feet away from the wingtip.
It's a crazy airport. So if you come down a little bit too late, you're not going to be able to slow down in time.
Do you have to just power up and then fly back up?
Well, that's the interesting thing.
I haven't seen why this aircraft was going around, but the Burbank Tower, which is who he's talking to, advised him that he's got to clear this.
This is an IFR aircraft, and for some reason it went missed approach.
I'm curious if it went missed approach because of visibility.
It was most likely visibility or it was an unstable approach, but I'm guessing it was visibility.
At the time, Burbank was reporting two and a half miles and overcast at 1,100 feet, same as Orange County, except for lower visibility.
Okay, so help me understand.
To me, if I'm out there and I can see two and a half miles, I feel like I'm on the crow's nest of the Titanic or something.
I mean, isn't that really, really good visibility?
Yeah. It's not great, but for a helicopter, that's plenty.
I mean, that is plenty.
Because visibility has to do with your speed, right?
And the higher your speed, the greater visibility you need.
And because they go slower, they would need less visibility.
Is that right? That's absolutely correct.
So Burbank Tower told him to hold outside the airspace.
He's trying to clear this aircraft.
This aircraft is missed approach.
He's climbing out of the airspace, and he's got to redirect this aircraft around the airspace to come back in and land.
So they hold out here for about 12 to 13 minutes.
They're requesting, if you look, the freeway is the 101 freeway.
That was what the original plan is.
They're requesting Burbank, hey, can I transition through your airspace on the 101 freeway?
I'm so sorry to interrupt you, John, but this is really fascinating to me.
I have no clue about any of this.
I love doing these shows because I get to learn about stuff.
So, what is the story with following these freeways?
I mean, don't they have big GPSs?
I mean, the idea that they're following freeways is really quite remarkable, but you're saying this is quite common, particularly for helicopters, right?
Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you were flying an IFR flight plan, you'd be flying a GPS waypoint to a GPS waypoint.
Eventually to some sort of ground-based antenna, which is at the airport.
And so you would just be flying basically a straight line from LA to Chicago at some point that are just all GPS waypoints.
Typically through a really congested area like Los Angeles, Burbank, the towers...
They coordinate with each other and they somewhat use these freeways because they're visual.
People can see them and they direct all the general aviation traffic.
So even the small Cessnas and Pipers, they typically will direct them along the freeways just because it's a big visual point and everybody kind of knows, hey, I'm going to send this traffic because they're trying to instruct IFR traffic over the top and in and out of these airports.
And then they're trying to get the general aviation traffic We're good to go.
Exactly. If you look at Highway 101 from Glendale, which is where they're holding, this is where the figure eights are occurring.
Yeah. And this is just for people that don't know the area.
This is just northeast of Hollywood.
The Hollywood sign and everything, it's all right there.
So you can kind of have a good visual where this is going.
They're eventually going to Camarillo Airport.
And if you look at the Highway 101...
It directly connects them just a straight west line to the Camarillo airport.
They can follow that. Sorry, where's Camarillo relative to this particular map?
Is it on this map? Yes.
If you just go to the west, you might not be able to see it on this video because you can't zoom in, but if you had a Google Maps up, it's just directly west of Burbank, which Van Nuys is the first airport you would hit on the 101, and then you'd hit Camarillo, which is just to the east of Oxnard, California. Okay.
All right. All right.
So, they do the figure eights, 12 to 13 minutes or so.
And then, is the idea that they were then supposed to be following a highway to get to their destination?
Yeah, that was the original plan.
If you listen to the air traffic control recording, the pilot that's flying this helicopter...
He requests to transition through the airspace on the 101 freeway.
The Burbank Tower tells him, initially, hold outside the airspace.
I've got an aircraft that's on a missed approach.
I've got to redirect him. At 933, Burbank Tower told the aircraft, hey, I have to send you north of the airport.
And what are your intentions?
He's saying, our field, he tells them, the field is IFR, say what your intentions are.
This is where the pilot asks for a special VFR clearance, which is, you're basically allowed to enter airspace that you would normally need an instrument flight plan to fly in, except for you're getting permission to fly at lower visibility levels.
And clearance from clouds.
So he says he wants to enter the airspace and transition to the west, and Burbank Tower comes back and says, okay, I need you to change your plan.
You're gonna go on the I-5 north, and he wants you to cross north of Burbank and north of the Van Nuys Airport.
This is a new plan. This is the first thing that's kind of changed in this little series or this little link before this accident.
Okay, and the reason for the change is this thick-like milk fog, or do we have any particular idea why this was the first change?
So, yes, because the airport is landing to the south, which means aircraft are coming in from the north of the airport, their orientation is pointed to the south, and they're landing on the south runways.
And so, based on that, and based on the departure traffic, they don't want a helicopter in front of the departing Got it.
Okay. Now, at this point, visibility is good enough that he can do the visual flight request, right?
So he can see well enough to say, listen, I don't have to go full instrumental at this point.
I can still eyeball it. Yeah, he asked for a special VFR in Class Charlie Airspace, and they gave him this clearance.
Helicopters can go much lower than fixed-wing aircraft, but typically for a fixed-wing aircraft, that would just be one mile and stay out of the clouds.
That's what the requirement is.
They had two and a half miles, so if they were a straight VFR, they'd have to have at least three miles.
So he's only a half-mile visibility under what would be legal to just penetrate normal VFR. So it's not that low of visibility for a helicopter, honestly.
And let's talk about some of this crazy California fog, right?
So we talked about this in preparation for the show about how looking horizontally, it can be very thick.
But if you're looking down...
It's a different matter.
And it's a very sort of horizontal, like a carpet, right?
And so he's going to have to keep his eyes glued below him to try and follow the highway.
And that's going to distract him from looking ahead, which may have been why he ended up going into the hillside.
Yeah. So years ago, 18 years ago, when I was a flight instructor, I would teach my students about this as a trap.
And fog can be extremely, extremely dangerous because it can completely obscure an airport.
But there's all types of fog.
There's fog from moisture radiating off the ground.
There's frontal fog.
There's fog because of the ocean.
There's many different ways fog can happen.
And certain types of fog You can actually see vertically through them to a point, if you're above it.
But if you get in it and you're looking horizontally through it, the visibility just instantly goes down to almost zero-zero.
And it's an illusion. I've taught my students for years that that's a trap.
In fact, many, many years ago, some friends of mine...
Came in with this false sense of security.
They saw what they thought was a runway.
And they lined up on it.
And they could see vertically to the ground.
And when they got about 50 feet off the ground, they realized they lost all visibility.
They went into the fog.
And this was probably right at dusk.
Right when it was kind of transitioning.
they opted to add power to the aircraft.
They went around.
And if they would have been one half of a second later, they would have crashed.
They ripped the nose gear off the aircraft.
Amazingly, the airplane still flew.
And when they got up above, they hit into a telephone pole.
Once they got up above it, they realized they actually lined up on a city street.
It was a neighborhood street that had lights down.
And the airport they were trying to line up was just the neighborhood just barely to the east by probably half a mile.
Now, the pilot got the wrong highway.
Is that the theory? Like he thought he was heading in one direction, but he was following the wrong highway?
So, yeah, there's a few other things that actually happened before this.
Oh, yeah, please take us through it step by step.
I love the detail myself.
So he gets clearance into the Burbank airspace.
He follows the I-5 north.
And Burbank tower comes back on.
And they asked him, you know, what he would like to do.
He says, would you like to follow the 118 westbound?
And the pilot says yes.
So there's a freeway that runs north of Burbank and Van Nuys.
And that is the freeway that air traffic control lined him up on to follow.
And then you can hear as he transitions from Burbank airspace to Van Nuys airspace.
And also, just a comment, you can hear...
I hear air traffic control people all over the country.
If you listen to the voice...
Recording from the ATC, the Van Nuys Tower Controller is super professional.
Her tone and her cadence, what she's given instructions, is as good as it gets.
I just wanted to comment on that.
I've heard her voice many times going into Southern California, so she is a very good controller.
Let me see, I'm looking at my notes too.
So this was at 933, Air Traffic Control asks him how he'd like to transition to the Camarillo Airport and says, would you like to follow the 118?
They reply, yes, they're at 1400 feet.
He switches from Burbank Airspace into the Van Nuys Airspace.
This is between 9.37 and 9.39.
So the accident happened very fast after this.
But he's locked onto the wrong highway, right?
So once he transitions around Van Nuys, he asks the tower controller, hey, can I transition south-west and join the 101?
And I think this is exactly where the accident occurs.
So you can see on the radar, he flies over Thousand Oaks, it looks like, and eventually joins up with a road.
I was actually listening to Bill Whittle earlier today, and he talked about this road, Las Virginas Road.
He said he's flown on this road many times.
It's a north... We're good to go.
Right. Now, okay, so here we can see on the graphic, this is the craft going up.
So what is he trying to do?
Is he suddenly concerned about the hills and he's just trying to climb out of the reach of the hills?
Or what do you think is going on?
I mean, we're speculating, of course, but what do you think is going on in his mind at this point?
Well, this is where the speculation occurs.
So the aircraft was last reported at 1,500 feet when he was talking to Van Nuys Tower.
Oh, sorry. That's when he says, the tower says, you're too low for us.
And now that doesn't mean that he's too low to fly safely.
It just means that they can't give him, they can't see him, and so they can't give him much advice.
Yeah, so actually that was the center controller.
Van Nuys Tower, and this is important because she asked him, when he asked to transition southwest to join the 101, She says, this is very important, she says, are you transitioning in VFR? And he comes back and says yes, which means I'm no longer special VFR, I'm transitioning into normal VFR weather.
So if he had the flight visibility at the time, this is why the NTSB is looking to see if there's cell phone video pictures anybody has of this area, because they want to see what the weather was like.
He says, yes, I'm transitioning in VFR. She says, would you like flight following?
And let me explain what...
I'm sorry, would you like flight what?
Flight following.
Because her jurisdiction is only within her airspace.
She is a tower controller just for that airport.
Once he has left her airspace, she would just let him transition as a VFR aircraft.
Or you can stay on with the center controller, which is Southern California or SoCal is what it's called.
And you can stay in radio contact with air traffic control.
And it's very limited what information they're going to give you.
It's mainly clearance with other aircraft.
That's all they're going to do.
They're not going to give you train clearance.
They're only going to give you clearance with other aircraft.
Well, especially if you're on VFR, because the idea that they can see better than you can see would be crazy, right?
Exactly. They can see other aircraft, but they can't see your terrain.
And the only terrain clearance you're going to get is if you're on an IFR flight plan.
So he says yes, which is the right thing to do.
They transition, and he's attempting to get a hold of Southern California.
You can hear back and forth on the radio radio.
And he says you're too low.
What he's saying is you're too low for me to get you on my radar.
You have to be typically 1500 to 2000 feet to get him on the radar.
And that's all he's saying. He's not saying you're too low for the terrain.
He's just saying simply, you're asking me to follow you on the radar, but I can't see you on the radar.
I'm so sorry, John, to interrupt.
I'm sure it's a brain spasm on my side, but if the helicopters are typically operating at 500 to 1,000 feet, but you need 1,500 to 2,000 feet to be on radar, then how on earth can they be of any help, the air traffic controllers?
It was probably just because of the terrain.
Out there in Los Angeles where it's flat, you could be just a couple hundred feet off the ground.
I mean, they could see you on the surface.
Oh, so because you're in the valley between, the radar can't pick you up because you're down below the top of the...
Okay, got it, got it. Sorry, I get it now.
It makes sense now. Okay, thanks. Exactly.
Okay. So if he's requesting VFR, then he can see.
Because if he couldn't see, wouldn't he say, I need IFR? That's right, yep.
And so now this is important because we've looked at this weather.
And remember I told you the ceiling was 1,100, which means that's feet above the ground.
If you look at Burbank, that's about 800 feet above sea level.
So if you add those together, the ceiling was about 1,900 to 2,000 feet above it.
That's where the actual cloud layer, which is a pretty thick cloud layer, he's flying below this cloud layer.
And so that's why he can see, but then he climbs.
Right. Yeah, so he can see, but there's also underneath this cloud layer, there's fog and haze.
So, I mean, this is where the problem is.
They call this scud running, if you're on a fixed-wing aircraft, where you're flying underneath a ceiling, but there's also fog and haze in the area.
So this is, for a helicopter, probably not as dangerous, because, I mean, a helicopter can just stop.
You know, a helicopter can completely stop.
It can land anywhere. It can just go straight up out of the clouds.
For a fixed wing aircraft, this is extremely dangerous.
You would never do this in a fixed wing aircraft because the recipe is set for disaster.
You have clouds above you, so you can't climb very high until you get in them.
And then you have mountain obscuration, which means haze and fog obscuring the mountains.
So if you're looking at this GPS or this Google Map image, this video you're watching...
Yeah, this is right before he does the climb.
Right. And so remember what altitude he climbed to before he crashed?
It was about 2,000 feet.
So that's in the fog?
That was into the cloud layer, yeah.
The fog is actually on the ground.
Fog is defined as something that's actually kind of sticking to the ground.
So he may have missed the 101...
He's trying to find an east and west road.
He continues on the Lost Virginis Road slightly to the south.
So you could see, obviously, something was obscuring the ground right here.
If he's a helicopter pilot with the experience he has, there was something, most likely it was fog, obscuring the 101 freeway because you could see clearly on the map that he crossed from north to south and missed that road, which his intention was to join that road and go westbound.
He may have got into a canyon.
They call them box canyons sometimes.
Fixed wing aircraft can't get out of him.
A helicopter could hover and get out of it.
But this is the canyon where they found the crash.
And you can see this is where he suddenly climbs up to 2,000 feet.
Most likely went back up into the cloud layer.
He could have become disoriented and the aircraft rolls to the left, rolls upside down, increases the speed, and that's where a crash site happened.
All right. So this, obviously, this particular moment is where the tragedy really comes to a head.
So he goes up into the cloud layer.
Now, again, we talked about this before, how people understand this is like...
Being inside a ping pong ball, you might not be able to see anything, and it's astonishing just how quickly you can become disoriented.
Your inner ear isn't telling you which way you're going.
Because of the momentum within your craft, you can be turning and think you're going straight because the G-forces give you the simulated gravity like you're still going straight.
And, you know, unless you've got your eyes glued to your artificial horizon and your altimeter, I mean, it's really, really easy to just get turned around like you wouldn't believe.
Exactly. And this is what's called an unusual attitude or an upset condition.
So, like you were saying earlier, if you gain a skill but you don't have a lot of experience actually exercising that skill...
And then all of a sudden that skill is called upon, you can get disoriented very fast.
I mean, look at the chart, the aviation chart you're looking at and how complicated that.
Oh, yeah, yeah. This thing back here, it's mad.
I mean, good luck deciphering that when your adrenaline is pounding four pounds a minute, right?
So as an inexperienced pilot, we manage all these.
These are task management or management tasks that we go through.
And you're managing the navigation, the weather, communication with air traffic control.
You're managing the physical manipulation of the aircraft.
Most likely he's hand flying this.
I don't think this aircraft has modes of...
I mean, it may have some sort of an autopilot, but...
The autopilot isn't flying anything.
If anything, it can maintain an altitude or something, but most likely he's just hand-flying this thing.
So there's so many different variables going on that if all of a sudden you have a situation where you become startled, you get confused, you get into some mountain obscuration, and you're trying to climb out of it, and then you climb up into a different type of cloud.
Remember, there's fog on the ground, and then there's an overcast layer.
So he's kind of sandwiched right in between Yeah, no, you've got the ground fog, and then you've got the clouds up above, and he's sort of flying in the middle.
And I guess he's concerned, maybe, and of course, these aren't perfectly flat, right?
I mean, they're going to ripple up and down.
So he probably is in an area where he's like, holy crap, I'm in like Death Hill Valley here, and I'm moving forward at a fair clip, so I'd better just climb.
But he climbs straight into the whiteout.
Yeah, I mean, imagine you're navigating with Google and you're driving down the freeway And all of a sudden, the last second, oh, here's my exit.
And you suddenly hit the brakes, and you really pull over, and you kind of go into the medium before you cross over onto your exit.
This is kind of what it looks like to me, where he kind of hit the brakes, like, oh, I missed my...
Obviously, he missed his road.
He may have had a GPS active in the aircraft, too, but, I mean, you can see that there's a sudden kind of turnabout, and he's trying to figure the situation out.
Most likely, what's happened is he's gone into...
Now, this aircraft is perfectly capable of maintaining...
Flight control in the clouds.
I do not suspect there's any type of icing.
I mean, it's just, it's Southern California.
No, I can't imagine. You're not going to get any type of icing in that, yeah.
And what, you know, the video that we're looking here is kind of deceptive.
Obviously, to me, it's deceptive in two ways.
You probably see even more. But the first way in which it's deceptive is that this is the artificial, well, the horizon is flat, right?
So it's not showing any tilt.
of the helicopter, which, of course, you can't really tell from the flight path.
And the other, of course, is here.
You can see, you know, this is like fantastic visibility, you know, like you'd have on the moon.
And this, of course, you know, you could just imagine putting two ping pong balls over your eyes while you're trying to fly this thing, because we don't know.
I think as far as I understand, it is not known yet at what angle the plane is.
It might have been upside down, as you say.
So it could be upside down.
You can't see a thing. And so this bit where you see this bit at the end where there's this, you know, what looks like a straight dive into the side.
And this is not the highest hill around or anything like that, but it's going straight down.
It doesn't... Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And they would fly in circles, they'd do G-forces, they'd climb, descend. And many times you'd do this at night and they would kind of point you at the ground and they would tell you to recover.
Sometimes they would tell you to recover and we would cover up the flight instruments.
So you're initially looking for your attitude indicator and sometimes your flight instructor would cover it.
And now you've got to look at other cues like your airspeed.
Is my airspeed increasing?
Obviously that means I'm not level flight.
There's other cues you can look at.
But sometimes people, you would recover and you would think you're straight and level and you would be in a 30 degree bank turn.
And it would feel like you're completely straight and level.
I remember one time pointing at a lake and my student thought he was flying straight and level.
And he's like, well, yeah, there's stars out here.
And I said, no, look closer. And he looks, and those were boats.
And he was headed straight at the water.
So the vesticular illusion can be completely...
And it can make you feel like you're tumbling backwards.
There's all different types of human factors that go into this.
And there's all kinds of visual and spatial illusions that make the ground look closer or farther away.
These are things we train as pilots.
But the spatial disorientation...
It is frightening.
I mean, if it takes over, it can make you completely flip upside down and you don't even know you're doing it.
So let's also talk about, I mean, we touched on this earlier, John, but the level of multitasking is...
Truly staggering to me about everything that is going on.
As you say, you've got your GPS. You've got, I don't know, like 20 or 30 instruments in front of you.
You've got your visual. You've got your channel with air traffic controller.
You're looking down, trying to find a road and follow that.
And at the same time, as you're trying to look ahead to see what the conditions are that you're flying into, you know, I know this stuff happens.
And 2020 hindsight is really easy.
But boy, a second pilot would seem to be kind of helpful in these kinds of situations, right?
This is exactly what I was going to say.
So on a 121 operation, which is the regulation that guides the commercial airlines, they require two pilots.
Now, I have friends that work for charter operations, and some of them model the charter operation after the airlines, which they require two pilots.
So they do the same training.
Also, airlines operate off of what's called an S.O.P. or standing operating procedure.
So you can be based out of L.A. You can get dispatched to Chicago by your company and get with a pilot that's in Chicago that you've never met and you're both operating the same checklist.
In fact, the airlines have everything so regulated that as an airline pilot, every single movement that you do with your left hand, your right hand is coordinated into what's called a flow or a task.
Which means at the beginning of the before-start checklist, you're literally flipping the light on, the beacon on, the hydraulic pumps on in a sequence, and you do it the same way every single time no matter what.
It's a perfect choreographed dance that pilots do.
And so you can go anywhere in the country with your company and work with two pilots together, and they can operate just like they've been flying together for years and years.
So, yes, this level of coordination with two pilots, and typically you have one pilot that's operating radios and one pilot that's flying, but both are mentally flying and sharing the decision making between each other.
So, yes, that second pilot would have been invaluable in the situation, especially for how much it would have cost, which would have been hardly anything.
I mean, it is ridiculous just how often you can be doing it.
Like, I've been producing these shows for 15 years, and at least once a month or once every two months, I'm like, oh, I forgot to put.mp3 at the end.
Like, there's always some little detail, even though you've been doing it forever and you can kind of do it in your sleep.
And you were pointing out that even though you've been flying for decades, there are still times where having a second pilot to remind you of something is really helpful.
Every single flight.
It doesn't matter how simple the task is.
If there's something that is non-standard, the other pilot's obligation is to say, hey, check your airspeed.
And you look down, oh, thanks.
And then your answer is correcting.
That's it. It's not a personal thing.
It's not an ego thing.
You could tell the captain if he's below his glide slope, check your glide slope, and the captain response is supposed to be correcting.
And then the other pilot watch is for that trend Um, for that, uh, the other pilot to correct the flight path, correct the airspeed.
Um, you're supposed to do it three times to check for incapacitation.
At the end of it, you're looking to see if the other pilots just slumped over with a heart attack or deciding to break the rules or something, but that's when the other pilot would take over.
So, for example, if there was a second pilot maybe watching the ground, the guy could have been watching the instruments or vice versa.
And somebody could have noticed something a little bit quicker and said, hey, check your airspeed or hey, check your attitude or hey, level off.
You know, having two pilots to back each other up is the level of safety you gain from that is tremendous.
Well, I actually have a relative who was a pilot in the Second World War and loved flying, although not particularly in the Second World War, but loved the flying.
And he became a pilot, a very skilled commercial pilot, coming in for a landing once.
He fainted for about 10 seconds.
And that was it. Never, never flew again.
He was never allowed to fly again.
And he became like an ambulance driver because he just loved the speed, I guess, right?
But of course, you know, having the second pilot there, which is the standard for commercial flights.
Okay, so let's just go, let's close off, if you don't mind.
Let me just throw out a couple of the 2020 hindsight stuff, of which I've been guilty of as well.
So I want to get the sort of the, so to speak, the air clear, which is probably a bad way to put it.
Okay, so let's say people say, well, what are your responses when people say, well, the LAPD was grounded, man.
I mean, he shouldn't have flown. Just like I told you earlier, I mean, it's a different operation.
It's a different mission. I mean, what is it that they're trying to achieve by flying?
Maybe they were grounded simply because it was just not valuable for them to fly.
Was it illegal under the circumstances I was looking his flight path?
He was completely legal to fly this.
And in fact, as a helicopter, he had more than significant visibility.
So why the LAPD was grounded, you know, I don't know the answer to that.
But was he legal?
Yes. Was his job to fly passengers, you know, somewhere that chartered a flight?
Yes, that's what his job was.
If it's legal and you can go, Then you just have to put on your layers of safety and say, okay, you have to know when something doesn't look right, but it's a legal flight.
And that's your job. And it was not unsafe looking at it on paper.
Right. Okay. Now, the one thing that I was struck by was how unconcerned the pilot appeared to be, even till the end.
I mean, I've heard, and it's kind of weird that we can listen in on this sort of last moment situation, but I've heard...
Other flight records or flight recordings where you can kind of hear the tension and the panic begin to grow.
And this guy is, you know, I mean, he's not sleepwalking through it or anything like that, but there doesn't seem to be any particular concern right before, you know, this people get wiped out.
Of course. Yeah, because could you imagine if there was panic in his voice, then the discussion would be, well, why didn't he climb?
I mean, we learn in aviation, the first thing is to fly the aircraft, no matter what.
And if you inadvertently break a rule, if you inadvertently go into clouds, you're supposed to climb, conserve, confess.
That's what the rule is. If you could sense in this guy's voice that he felt like he was doing something wrong, this conversation with air traffic control, with the NTSB, they'd be focusing in on saying, hey, this guy sounds nervous.
He's probably doing something he thinks he's not supposed to be doing.
But he wasn't. And his voice sounded calm.
And professional. And so in his head, everything was proceeding just normal.
And so you can see right before the crash, this was a sudden upset.
In aviation, with the airlines, we train what's called extended envelope training, which they'll roll us upside down and let us recover.
But also what they do is they have us recover from A situation where we're distracted and then they startle us.
Startle us with a turbulence upset with wake turbulence or something.
And they want to see, they want to try to build into you what your initial response is going to be.
So just like you were saying, this guy felt like everything was under control.
He felt like his navigation, his control of the aircraft was fine.
It was just within a few seconds and it all went wrong.
So he was startled.
He went into the clouds or something, whatever happened, you can see it was a very, very sudden thing.
Are it some mechanical failure, do you think?
I mean, obviously it's possible, but that aircraft is very reliable.
I mean, maybe they're just going to have to see, but it's very unlikely.
I mean, looking at the ceiling and the fog and mountain obscuration, knowing the terrain out there, Just putting myself in the mindset of somebody that's working, you're going to work, you're getting your passenger somewhere, everything feels good.
I have been on flights like this a thousand times.
And most likely it was inadvertent penetration into the clouds and some sort of a spatial disorientation that caused them to lose control of the aircraft.
So, I mean, this to me is the essential and why I think it's important to focus on this stuff.
I mean, I'm not going to be flying in my own personal helicopter anytime soon unless, you know, something strange happens in my life.
But the issue to me is always lessons learned.
And from what I've understood about these kinds of situations, John, it's usually a series of things, a series of decisions, each...
Decision in and of itself does not cause the accident, but these sort of escalating dominoes end up with the situation.
How far back do you think the first domino can be traced?
Because that's, you know, where you want to prevent rather than try and cure, right?
So is there any series of decisions or situations that you can, again, I know we're speculating here, that you could extract from this situation so that people could try and avoid this kind of stuff in the future, which I know they're always trying to do, but the earlier you can divert this path, so to speak, the better. So there's kind of two questions there.
The NTSB is going to look at everything.
They're going to look at the guy's entire record.
They're going to look at the night before.
Did he sleep? You know, was he fighting with his wife?
They're going to look at everything.
So when you talk about an accident chain, that accident chain could have started 24 hours ago.
When I look at the flight plan, obviously the first thing that's kind of not a problem but is something that, you know, Maybe they're trying to get somewhere on time, and now there's a 12-minute delay holding outside of Burbank and getting rerouted from what his original plan was straight ahead on the 101.
They get diverted up north onto two different freeways.
And he's trying to find his way back to the 101 after this kind of short diversion, which isn't uncommon, but it wasn't what his original plan was.
But it's funny, too, because the whole point of this is to avoid traffic jams, and you end up snarled for almost a quarter hour over LA, right?
Yeah, exactly. But still traveling with the helicopters pretty quick.
It was 30 minutes to get up there.
But if I had...
Obviously, the people that are flying on these kind of airplanes, they have money.
And... But they're not going to make a regulation change that says a 135 operation has to have two pilots.
They're just not going to do it. But as a passenger, you could certainly ask for two pilots.
There's no reason you can't.
Even if it's the chief pilot that flies along in the right seat and the outfit isn't even really meant to have somebody in the right seat, just having that second set of eyes, looking for traffic, helping with the radios, I mean, if you're a high-profile person like this and you want to avoid things in the future, I would just demand a second pilot.
That's the easiest thing to do.
A second pilot, an aircraft like this for somebody sitting in there, maybe $100,000 a year, $120,000 a year.
I really don't know, but it's not that much.
You know, for somebody who's worth tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars.
I think he's well north of half a billion.
And I would say, again, hindsight is so simple, but particularly when there is the risk of visibility problems, that seems to me, I mean, it's hard looking at this, you know, this sort of Google Maps flyby.
You know, I flow my share of flight simulators and so on.
But it's hard to sort of imagine, oh, man, if it's this clear, you're going to end up with a lot of problems.
But where the visibility goes, and you have to go full instrumentation, With your inner ear going haywire and maybe you haven't done it for a while, it's when there are visibility issues that, to me, the second pilot would be an even better idea.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
I mean, I would just say if these outfits, just from a liability standpoint, had two pilots on, it's going to cost them more.
I know aviation is a very hard thing to make money in, and they're always trying to...
The margins are so tiny because the operating costs are so high.
But... The safety gained by having that second pilot.
And also not only that, but each one of these operations has their own culture, their own rules they follow and everything.
But if they model them after the airline and they try to create a culture where it's a crew environment versus a single pilot operation, it just increases the safety tenfold.
Okay. Well, listen, I really, really appreciate your time.
This is fascinating stuff and whatever we can do to prevent these kinds of disasters is great.
I hope that you can join us back again when the reports start to come out from the regulatory agencies about what might have happened because it doesn't...
Something doesn't quite sit right, which, you know, I'm just an amateur guy sitting in a studio, but something doesn't seem quite right in that it's really hard to see the dominoes, and I hope that it does become clearer once they start to do more of a clear analysis.
But I really, really do appreciate your time today.
Absolutely fascinating, and your knowledge is stellar.
Yeah, anytime. If there's any aviation-related stuff, you can call me anytime.
All right. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.
Take care. Yep, no problem.
Thanks, Jeff. Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain show on philosophy.
And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
Please like, subscribe, and share, and all of that good stuff to get philosophy out into the world.
And also, equally importantly, go to freedomain.com forward slash donate.
To help out the show, to give me the resources that I need to bring more and better philosophy to an increasingly desperate world.
So thank you so much for your support, my friends.
▲
Export Selection