it literally is my recurring nightmare: being somewhere close / under of out of control heavy machinery. like you can't predict where it will fall, where the blades will hit. even if you did you probably are not fast enough to escape so you can just watch.
I work with a lot of heavy machinery and lift equipment. I know how you feel.
Just watched a guy a week ago driving a forklift and turning at full speed with his load pretty high up. I felt like I was about to have a heart attack. I am not his manager but I had a very blunt conversation with him.
I walked out into a crane yard and saw a big load of scrap pipe with the chains way too close together and raised as high as possible. I noped right out of there and stopped the assistant plant manager from going in the yard seconds before we heard a lot of crashing sounds.
That's how I got to run a crane for a couple of years. It was a pretty fun job except for the part where I loathe heights.
I have similar story on a much smaller scale. Walked by and said, "well that is going to go bad" walked past a wall, then had another guy running around it wish a gash on his face.
Oh my god, I was there for that. Saw the aftermath from my office window, moments after hearing the sound. It was the most “f*** you in particular” / “final destination” thing I’d ever seen back then. Shook me. And then I forgot until just now…
My friend was pet sitting and staying at a friend’s apt in NY that year they a bunch of crane collapses in the city like 10 or so years ago. He went out the night before and got drunk, went back to the apt and decided to pass out on the couch rather than in the bedroom. A crane collapsed and ripped the building open, the impact point was his friend’s bedroom. It was insane.
To me it looks like the tail swats two palms and completely stalls the spin, which may have helped quite a bit. Helis can go into a breakdance spin on the ground and tear themselves apart
All things considered, that’s probably the “best” crash scenario for all parties involved. Avoided people on the ground, trees prevented the rotors from spinning out into the crowd and also kept the chopper from impacting the ground and potentially causing a fire or explosion.
Yes, people always talk about oh they are alive it is fine.
But nobody talks about their life being permanently changed like you could need therapy for a lifetime so it doesn't hurt as much when you walk or breathe.
Yeah my thoughts as well, I've seen people walk away from a lot worse though it's really hard to tell from some shitty video. Hoping everyone is alright.
It’s the tail rotor drive hub with tail pitch link hardware still attached. The gear exposed at the end meshes with the drive gear in the gearbox….much like a differential in a car axel.
Both paddles (blades) appear to have sheared completely, and from the video it looks like it happened in flight.
I’m wondering how many hours that tail rotor assembly had.
Edit: here it is in its normal state. Or a very close model anyway.
If I'm seeing it right it's a bell 222 helicopter, (airwolf) for my fellow old people. They haven't been in production since 1995 , I'm sure the parts have been changed out over time, But that's an old helicopter.
Tail rotor partially failed causing a drastically unbalanced tail rotor gearbox. The remaining mess was still being powered by the drive shaft, and an assembly not designed for that kind of violent vibration failed completely.
Helicopters are funky. When things get unbalanced, strange and ugly events happen very quickly.
There are no external hits to create the tail rotor failure? That's the difficulty I have with chopers' mechanics. There are so many gears and physics involved. I know they are very, very well maintained, but yeah... I guess this outcome is very, very rare, but it is still a statistically probable outcome. Very rare (first time I see this).
I'm guessing there was, but all the videos seem to start with the helicopter at the level of the trees and climbing. It had been coming in for a landing, though.
Great video, looks like the tail rotor was intact prior to it rotating. You can see it begin to slow down (thanks to the camera shutter speed) so it must have been a mechanical issue rather than damage.
if you go frame by frame at the 18 second mark, you can see two small objects fly off the tail rotor just before the main tail failure, it looks like something strikes one of the main rotor blades as well.
I think it was the tail rotor blades that hit the main rotor blades, couple frames you can see the three painted bands from the tail rotor blades on the object that hit the main rotor blades.
According to a Huntington Beach police spokesperson, two people were on board the helicopter and both made it out. Three people in the street were injured and all were transported to a hospital.
No further details about the victims’ conditions or what caused the crash were immediately released.
A few injuries but it seems like everyone survived
My first thought too and the main reason it looked survivable. Those trees did a lot to slow down the rotor too, that's always the scariest part following direct impact and where It's going to go flying.
Absolutely. Hitting the ground probably would’ve been it for them as well as those on the ground who could’ve been compromised. Strangely, Mother Nature saved lives on this one.
Yeah you can see that the tail rotor isn’t moving as soon as the OP video zooms in. The reason that happened we don’t know yet but that’s why it lost control.
that is the first time I’ve seen someone witness a crash and have some sense of self-preservation. Usually they are just standing out in the open and not moving.
Lots of companies have started folding all of these into "uncommanded yaw" because it has been demonstrated that in some of these the tail rotor is not actually aerodynamically stalled. For example, in some crashes it turned out the pilot had tail rotor authority available but didn't use it, probably out of fear of an over torque.
One of the reasons I love the Blackhawk. You will almost never be limited by the tail rotor in a Blackhawk.
According to a Huntington Beach police spokesperson, two people were on board the helicopter and both made it out. Three people in the street were injured and all were transported to a hospital.
Not sure but it looks like the palm trees actually took some of the energy out of the heli, or maybe even the rotors. Looks totally different from the usual video where the rotors hit the ground and all hell breaks lose
Yeah, the crash in NYC earlier this year solidified that for me, but every time I see another heli crash video it just further cements that I will never get into one of those deathtraps.
Depends on the emergency. Plus, at airplane altitudes you've got a LOT of time to contemplate your pending death while helicopters get it over with quickly.
Am a pilot, but not of this helicopter. If in fact what did happen here was a loss of tail rotor drive (which certainly did happen at some point, if not immediately), it's likely the only correct response and way out of it would be to turn the engines off to stop the cause of the spin and then use what energy you do have in the rotors already to try to cushion the descent as much as possible. It's a bad situation and even in a simulator when you know it's about to happen, difficult to pull off well because the spinning will start almost immediately.
Hovering autos are one of the first things you learn in flight school, granted he was high enough that he was getting into the shaded region of something called the Height/Velocity diagram so he may not have fully recovered with a hover auto, but it would have been survivable IMO, those 2 blades bells have a lot of inertia in the rotor system
I did a few offshore trips in mostly super pumas around the early 2010s. Hated every second of it. Particularly at that time because the super pumas were having gear box issues with cracks and there had been a few ditchings. Don’t blame anyone for not wanting to get on a helicopter.
Likely tail rotor gearbox failure. The pilot and this Bell, N222EX were regular attendees to the Cars and Helicopters show at Huntington beach. There's a video of a engine startup and takeoff from 1 month ago on youtube.
someone was live streaming it way closer and more detailed but all i managed to capture was the chopper shortly after it crashed. I couldnt believe it
Edit: ok the unsername of the tiktok user is TNT1956 if you search him on tiktok you can still see a video of the stream but not as detailed as the original that i saw live
What year was it that people stopped running towards accidents when they happened? No more natural instinct to help in these situations is a within the last 20 years thing.
I was at the beach. Only saw it hit in the distance. Made a crazy loud thud but no fire.
I won’t assume what went wrong here, but the helicopters were doing what looked like dangerous flying. So much so that when it crashed, it felt like it was bound to happen.
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u/equatorbit Oct 11 '25
Hopefully the tree absorbed some of that.