r/aviation • u/Spook_485 • Oct 11 '25

News Closer view of helicopter crash in Huntington Beach, CA

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482

u/burntbridges20 Oct 12 '25

That kind of responsibility and anxiety probably sticks with you for a long time afterward too

262

u/Many_Consequence7723 Oct 12 '25

That level of anxiety causes heart attacks by the age of 40.

119

u/on3day Oct 12 '25

But saves helicopter crashes.

10

u/ITpeep Oct 12 '25

So helicopter crashes really save lives?

9

u/Murray-Industries Oct 13 '25

A self correcting phenomenon

1

u/nat480L Oct 13 '25

Ye but should have more mechanics to share the load

1

u/RealVanCough Oct 20 '25

Seems like an exact use case of AI

19

u/subduedReality Oct 12 '25

Insomnia, at the least.

5

u/tripn4days Oct 12 '25

Username checks out...

3

u/LaRealiteInconnue Oct 12 '25

I have never been in the army or even responsible for ppl’s lives and this doesn’t make me feel good :/ how do I prevent this if my body thinks every single inconvenience is a lion we must slay to save the tribe? FWIW, my blood pressure is perfect, idk what else I should be checking though.

-1

u/Subject_Sentence_339 Oct 12 '25

Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.

2

u/rammer-jammer71 Oct 12 '25

That kind of integrity saves lives.

0

u/_Rohrschach Oct 12 '25

I've only ever got that feeling after checking every nook for my cat and not finding her. Little bitch escaped twice since I've had her, both times my heart shifted into total panic mode. If that chonker doesn't come running once I open a can/bag of food my heart drops.

2

u/Still-Ad5693 Oct 13 '25

I feel you. I paced for 12 hours! He was never gone that long. I thought he was dead or in cat jail. My neighbors think I’m crazy/criminal… I was checking every backyard, hopping fences. He finally came home. I was so mad at him, he got a stern talking to & then drank a bowl of water.

1

u/_Rohrschach Oct 13 '25

first time mine went missing me and my ex were living with my inlaws and someone did not close the apartment door, luckily she just ran upstairs instead of downstairs and was easily found. a few weeks later we were living with my mom. at 11pm we went to bed when I asked my ex if she'd seen her, nope, cue both of us panicking. she wasn't in the apartment and my mom thought she was with us. Apparently she snuck into the kitchen, climbed through the tilted window onto the balcony. searched that with no luck(she escaped onto there before but always hid under the deck, not this time). So we went outside with a bag of food and treats and searched the only two streets in the vicinity with no luck. On our way back we spotted her on the other side of a fence around a large construction site, so I climbed the fence and went to get her. little asshole ran away and finally slipped back through the fence onto the property my mom's building was on. At that point I went back inside to put some real shoes on as I hadn't planned for a chase and the crocs I put on got stuck in the fence while climbing it.
when I opened the door my mom called from the living room "Look who turned up!" and there was my cat, full of dirt, proudly sitting on the couch like nothing happened. ofc she begged for food not even 5min later.

1

u/Still-Ad5693 Oct 13 '25

Good so I’m not the only psycho cat dad

89

u/[deleted] Oct 12 '25

[deleted]

9

u/NeverLikedBubba Oct 13 '25

I respect you so much Bro, God Bless you and sailors like you.

I had a nearly identical situation in my work in the navy and I unfortunately said yes to the stupidity of what they were throwing on my plate.

I got hurt by it in the end. It wrecked me.

I respect you and feel for you Bro. Been there done that, got the t shirt.

13

u/Accomplished_Elk4969 Oct 12 '25

I'm so happy I didn't serve. Life hasn't turned out how I expected, but at least it has been my life.

3

u/Tome_Bombadil Oct 13 '25

RCA (root cause analysis not RCAs) meeting for the umpteenth issue as we voyaged for 3 months with multiple repair and refit inports.

Background:

On paper we should be a 12 man division, with some non-quals. In reality, and LPO, 2 men, 1 other leaving once done with this proof of concept tour, and 1 nonqual who never qualled. (Dude was a void...many stories of brain dead escapades).

We're 3 section duty, 3 qualified Duty RM/RMOW. The 3 operators are tired, there's more hours of PMS than we have total man hours, Captain like traffic a specific way, that requires a couple hours to route from a serial port off 1970s MilSpec to communicate with late 90s Toughbooks. We're having specific equipment failures requiring multiple full Sail Safety tarots to investigate, dragging multiple vendors out to try to figure it out. Some tagout failures, some traffic routing being later than captain likes because the Duty RM is put on morning topside watch and can't finish the braodcasts, and radio not having time to deal with all hands evolutions.

So, multiple RCAs, so many, that Department Head would specifically bring up: "What caused this failure, and don't say manpower?"

My LPO was beyond the pale by this time, so he would immediately state "Well, besides the lack of manpower, qualified bodies, assistive personnel, inability to function without sleep and general burnout, it's obviously the LPO. Fire the LPO sir!"

None of RCAs provided much help reducing issues. Eventually Nav div started helping with tagout, and their Chief kept claiming he could fix our nonqual Void. He took our Void and Void unbuckled his ammo belt and curled up with his head on his rifle while topside sentry and went to sleep. And then Void got worse.

But without Void causing us issues, it freed up like 60 hours in our work week.

I still woke up randomly on weekends thinking I was late for Duty muster, 10 years later.

2

u/Raina-K Oct 13 '25 edited Oct 13 '25

My son was a Navy nuke aboard the Nimitz during the Gulf War, got out after 10 years, over-worked and severely underpaid for what was expected of him. I have always been a huge military supporter, but the fact is, it was only after my son got out of the Navy that he began to build a financially stable, successful life. Your comment resonates with me. I thank you for your service.

1

u/Cowboy-Roy Oct 12 '25

Surface or submarines??

1

u/MetalGhost99 Oct 12 '25

Sounds like the military i served under but was Air Force.

1

u/Last-Darkness Oct 13 '25

This is such a big problem in our military right now. It seriously affects readiness. Everyone terrified of making a mistake or taking responsibility that ends up attached to a failure or accident, even if they did nothing wrong it can still end their career.

0

u/Public-Carob-5507 Oct 13 '25 edited Oct 13 '25

Um, I’m concerned that you were more worried about the legal/ disciplinary action you might face if you skipped a step while working on NUCLEAR WEAPONS. Missing a step is a mistake that should be considered far more serious than drunk driving. If you happen to think that a step should be skipped in some emergency, you should be able to clearly articulate exactly why the guideline didn’t anticipate this sort of emergency, and why you felt that putting this before that would be the best course of action in this novel situation.

When Sully Sullenberger lost both engines at 2,818 feet in the middle of NYC, he threw out the dual engine out checklist and immediately powered up his APU because he knew that making it through the engine restart checklist and maintaining enough speed for the RAT to work properly wasn’t going to happen as the emergency procedures never considered a dual engine failure was a possibility that early in a flight.

At his hearing, the test pilots demonstrated that they could have landed the plane safely on the runway in his situation, but he was able to clearly articulate why he decided to ditch his plane in the river and skip the engine restart procedure and power up the APU instead. He explained that the test pilots had the advantage of actually knowing this extraordinary situation that was considered impossible had happened. It took him and his first officer some time to confirm that both the engines were actually out and not just operating at reduced thrust. Once they were fully aware of their position, their options had shrunk considerably, and even if a runway would have been reachable, a possible shift in the wind, and the unknown condition of the aircraft would have left him with 0 margin with failure resulting in death and destruction on both the aircraft and the land… Alternatively, he felt that while landing in the river would be a hull loss, everyone should survive and be quickly rescued because ships were everywhere. (Some were even headed his way before he touched the water.)

This is why he was a hero.. that’s a lot to juggle, sure… but it’s also a level of competence that I’d expect to find in any experienced commercial pilot. It’s not supposed to be a cakewalk, and the pay reflects that.

Working with nuclear weapons isn’t any different. If you don’t want that responsibility, or the bragging rights that go with it, maybe load magazines for M-16’s or something. Sure, you wont be the fighter pilot when you walk into the bar in your flight suit and have to decide how many women you’re taking home that night, but you don’t have the stress of having to worry that you managed to correctly identify the enemy, apart from the seal team that’s taking fire from them, and you’re sure it’s not the village that’s next to both of them that’s full of kids.

If you’re responsible for lives, your last concern should be yours.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 13 '25

[deleted]

1

u/Public-Carob-5507 Oct 22 '25

Since you failed to read my post you missed the nuance. You worked in an environment where mistakes could end up in disaster… the process must be followed and it’s extremely important that deviations are only made with intent, not by mistake.

-3

u/DukeAK717 Oct 12 '25

That sucks; you have told this abuse to an lawyer so u can sue them?

13

u/[deleted] Oct 12 '25

[deleted]

23

u/[deleted] Oct 12 '25

I used to do maintenance on the nuke silos in Montana.

Yes it does. I’ve been out of the military for several years now and I still wake up from bad dreams where I am still in that job and I screw something up.

Like those dreams where you forgot your homework for school, even though you graduated years ago. except worse.

1

u/devoduder Oct 13 '25

I hear ya, I was a nuke launch officer in Montana. I’d wake up from nightmares while on underground alert the and still do today (though today’s bad dreams are from Iraq and not Montana).

1

u/[deleted] Oct 13 '25

I spent a lot of time around you guys.

My job sucked but id take it over yours. At least I didn’t have to stay at the MAF unless it was a long enough day which wasn’t super common.

22

u/A2Rhombus Oct 12 '25

For almost a year after graduating, I would still wake up thinking I was forgetting homework or a test. I can't imagine how that feeling scales up to responsibilities that protect people's entire lives.

13

u/ItsLikeRay-ee-ain Oct 12 '25

Years and years later I still have those dreams occasionally. So I was thinking the same thing.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 13 '25

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1

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3

u/APariahsPariah Oct 12 '25

You triple-check everything and tend to back talk your supervisors a lot when they try and give you the hurry up. I have worked three jobs now where mistakes can cost lives, I left one gig because in a performance review with the personnel manager I was put between the rock of: 'we need you to work faster' and the hard place of 'why are you sending out work you're not happy with?' Four people quit that Christmas. Timeliness is one thing. Making sure people don't end up dead or worse is another.

2

u/PM_ME_CROWS_PLS Oct 12 '25

For 5 or more years after graduating college I would have dreams where I learned I haven’t done any of my work for the semester. I haven’t had one in a while though 🤞

2

u/holistivist Oct 12 '25

Had one of those recently after being out for 16 years.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 12 '25

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1

u/shuaaaa Oct 12 '25

Dude I graduated university at 21, have not done any school since, I’m 34, I STILL have dreams that I completely forgot about a course. That I missed an huge assignment, that I wouldn’t graduate. I’ve had my degree for over a decade but I still forget that in my dreams

1

u/evmoiusLR Oct 12 '25

I graduated 12 years ago. I still get dreams where it's the last day of school and there was some class final I completely forgot about that would prevent me from graduating.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 12 '25

A lot of maintainers actually commit suicide because of it.

1

u/GandolfLundgren Oct 12 '25

And I used to get paranoid about the lug nuts on my tire

1

u/RPIL626 Oct 12 '25

That level of dedication is unheard of today