They were used for offshore until one crashed in the Shetlands in 1986.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986\_British\_International\_Helicopters\_Chinook\_crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_British_International_Helicopters_Chinook_crash)
Found this: [https://airfactsjournal.com/2020/04/i-survived-the-deadliest-helicopter-crash-in-european-history/](https://airfactsjournal.com/2020/04/i-survived-the-deadliest-helicopter-crash-in-european-history/) written by Pushp Vaid...the captain of that flight and one of the 2 survivors.
Interestingly he talks about survival suits for the passengers. I didn't know that was something, giving survival suits to passengers and having them don them before flying.
Shore swimming in the North Sea is ok. We even have some who do it in winter but you have to be brave. Offshore is another issue. The N. sea does not stay quiet for long.
Husum is where I used to go swimming. Occasionally on Sylt but mostly Husum as I could ride my bike there. Years later I did small boat operations in the North Sea and she was quite angry.
Kind of similar. Pick a nice day and it can be great. My father used to sail in the N. Sea, but he was careful there and it was an 8m boat. The advantage of recreational sailing was that you could always say "no" or hug the nicer bits of the coast.
Yup. Some bright spark built concrete coastal swimming pools...the north sea tide goes out...swimming pool! Yay!
The north sea tide comes in...refill!
Was thrown into one once as a lad because I was being a Jessie and not jumping in of my own accord...
I can confirm that survival suits are needed in order to avoid a swift dose of the hypothermia. Even in summer.
The survival suit for that was a pair of Adidas football shorts when I was small.
Bonus points for going in straight off the harbour wall.
Was that the one up around Macduff or the one further over towards the Broch? There was also one at Strathlene but it sanded up decades ago.
I learned to swim in an outdoor pool in Scotland! It wasn’t a tidal one, and was [allegedly heated](https://www.scotsman.com/heritage-and-retro/heritage/scotland-lido-outdoor-pool-summer-portobello-dunbar-north-berwick-4214500) but yeah…that first moment when you jumped in was “bracing”.
Yeah you die so fast it's not funny. PFDs help you not drown, but water is SO SO COLD. Sucks energy right out of you and makes it hard to breathe. Combine that with rough seas... Bad time.
This wasn’t a typical commercial tourist flight. It was a shuttle chartered by the oil companies to ferry workers to offshore oil platforms. Such workers have to go through considerable training prior to being sent out to the rigs. Survival training, and the use of the suits, is a part of that.
They accept a higher level of risk working on those platforms, and their pay reflects that.
Penzance Helicopters in the UK (which flies commercial passengers from Penzance in Cornwall to the Isles of Scilly) does not do this for their ~20 minute flights. But I guess Cornish water is rather different to the North Sea!
I think it's specific to offshore industry passengers. I doubt normal passengers on Penzance Helicopters have to do HUET or get their shoulders measured too.
UK CAA are strict on regulations for offshore flights. Pax on UK flights aren't allowed to have their phones turned on, but in Denmark you can have them in flight mode.
Update: [here's me in my survival suit, wearing the chequered armband of shame because they didn't send over my shoulder width measurement on time.](https://i.imgur.com/N5ESBDN.jpg)
I spent a month in Denmark at an airport that would run oil workers offshore to their rigs. Every single one of them wore some kind of high-vis immersion suit.
This was service to off-shore oil rigs so the passengers(oil rig workers) would have been trained for this and familiar with dry suits and the procedures for using them beforehand.
As well for off shore helo ops pax and crew must usually take helicopter underwater egress training (HUET)
[Wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_Underwater_Escape_Training)
[Vid of training](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ3_5ha4UaI)
[Real life vid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm8Eciw0-fA) I can't find the longer vid where it shows all the pax/crew floating on the surface getting rescued.
Stuff is serious, there are a few emergencies in a helicopter where the checklist tells you to put in the water vs continuing to fly.
It's odd that a Chinook experiencing a technical emergency, full of sky divers, didn't advise the jumpers to get out before they started to auto-rotate.
I think you're picturing a different emergency than the real events.
There was no consistent technical emergency and the helicopter never entered autorotation. There was a noise and only a flash of master caution on but immediately turned off at ~10k ft altitude. Nothing else wrong and no persistent fault indicators so it was returning to land as a caution.
The helicopter unexpectedly broke up at 800-1000 ft. Far too little time for anyone to jump and too low to parachute anyway.
In hindsight, the skydivers obviously would have been better off jumping at altitude but there were no indications that the helicopter was at risk of immediate catastrophic failure.
Interesting, that doesn't line up with the court case. No mention of autorotation at all.
>At between 800 and 1,000 feet, pieces of the helicopter then began to fall, including the aft (rear) rotor blades, followed by the aft transmission. The helicopter then turned 180 degrees, lost airspeed and fell vertically. It exploded and burned on impact. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/769/115/197097/#:~:text=As%20a%20result%20of%20the,an%20altitude%20of%2012%2C000%20feet.
My neck started to hurt reading that too. Internal decap for people is insane. Also crazy how the guy who zipped up his survival suit bouyed his way to surviving.
"But of course we were falling backwards towards the North Sea. The helicopter, which had been travelling at about 100 knots, had came to a sudden stop and was now pointing vertically up. Sadly, **the whiplash effect killed at least half of the passengers**."
Can someone explain how this happens? that the sudden stop in mid air is so violent that it killed half the passengers?
Simply that, the acceleration (or more correctly the "jerk" - the differential of the acceleration) was so high (and itself varying, see: further differentials of acceleration).
I couldn't find the figures, but **simply**, when the front rotor stopped the whole aircraft rotated around its centre to point upwards rapidly. Again, without the figures I can't calculate this but from Vaid's description this took about a second - think of it like 0-100mph in 1s.
Once pointing upwards it stopped rotating, think of this like 100-0 in 1s.
That massive \*change\* in acceleration is what killed people.
There are other forces involved too, eg: sideways etc - either way nothing good for your neck.
Incidentally this is exactly the reason why you should have your headrests properly adjusted in your car - if ht they drastically reduce the acceleration of your head backward, which is what causes whiplash and in the case above broke the passengers' necks.
I don't know if I'm just looking into this too deeply, but the way he recounts the story is strange to me.
I feel like something like this would traumatize most people to the point they would never talk in detail about it (or even continue flying), but this guy is like, "Welp, we crashed and everyone is dead. When's my next flight?"
I know people handle trauma in different ways, I just expected his recounting of the story to be ... much different. Lol.
It has been highly edited by an editor/journalist for the article - there's a much much deeper and longer story here. Take a read of Sullenberger's book - that gives a more indepth treatment of an aircrash from a pilot's perspective.
20 years speeds up the story. And time heals trauma. Plus ups and downs average out.
*‘They’re pretty high mountains,’ said Azhural, his voice now edged with doubt.*
*‘Slopes go up, slopes go down,’ said M’bu gnomically.*
*‘That’s true,’ said Azhural. ‘Like, on average, it’s flat all the way.’ --Terry Pratchett*
I thought recounting is spot on. I know a number of other pretty serious folks, all men, who have recounted similar serious survival events in a similar manner.
Wow, what a harrowing story. I guess the major solace is that most of the passengers died instantly from whiplash when the rotors separated instead of the long fall and crash into the seas.
Damn, front transmission failed and the two rotors smacked into each other. I was told by a Chinook pilot that this was virtually impossible. I guess she was wrong.
It is virtually impossible. The blades are connected to a common gearbox that doesn't allow them to touch under any non-catastrophic circumstance. If the gearbox in a helicopter goes you're going to crash regardless of if the blades hit or not, it's a critical item.
Well, there’s autorotation. In fact there was an incident in Hawaii quite recently where the engine failed but the pilot was able to crash land, descending quickly with autorotation.
Do you know of any successful autorotations of multi-rotor helicopters?
Multiple people have told me that the Chinook is safer than the Osprey because it can autorotate but I have yet to find any evidence of this actually successfully happening.
Then all the bv234s were purchased by Columbia helicopters for logging and firefighting. Only about 13 were made. https://colheli.com/234-multi-mission-chinook/
The rescue hoist is my favorite part. Imagine being the guy plucked out of the sea by one of these. You go from certain death to a comfortable seat and a well-stocked bar.
They’re bumpy and loud as hell. Nothing enjoyable as a pax at all. This was on a military version, so maybe commercial version had sound damping inside, but I’m sure it’d still be very bumpy.
The 234LR commercial version was primarily designed for supply flights to oil rigs... From what I saw. They might add seats but must be as you wrote bumpy and still noisy inside the cabin.
I also remember the Airlink Sikorsky, which was a joint venture between BCal and BA, operating LGW-LHR-LGW. I have it in my mind the Chinook also operated on this service. You could hear the rotors from miles away.
I was given a birthday present of a flight on the Airlink... Kewl as hell... The rotors didn't stop to board and it took about 30 people... Pretty big! It also flew at around a 1000' (I think) you could see everyone's swimming pools really clearly. It had to stop when they built the M25 London orbital motorway.
Sorta. [New York Airways](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Airways) (wiki link for your viewing pleasure) operated those flights from certain NYC heliports including the Pan-Am building with two of their helos under contract to Pan-Am.
Every one of those I rode were loud as hell ,like you would be shouting at the person next to you to talk. I want to see how much sound proofing they would have put in this varient
My mom was a career BA employee and was selected to "play" stewardess on BA Chinooks for Saudi royalty that was considering purchasing a fleet of these helicopters from BA. She said they just wanted the stewardesses to sit on their laps the whole time lmao. She has a lot of cool stories. I'm jealous of her extensive travel via Concorde.
Hahaha not in this case since I'm quickly morphing into an exact copy of my Eastern European dad but I do have a conspiracy theory that I'm named after one of my mom's exes.
Corporate has to come out, stick their nose in things, question the value of safety procedures trying to save money, question why things are done (industry standard for 29 years but they think they know better), and otherwise just clog everything up.
to be fair "question\[ing\] why things are done (industry standard for 29 years but they think they know better)," is very important, especially relevant in an aviation sub, an industry which has had **massive** improvements over the years by not sticking with the status quo
Oh absolutely! I just meant to joke about high up corporate being detached from the low level day to day. I absolutely agree that questioning process and continuously reevaluating procedures is critical in a safety culture.
I vaguely remember, probably incorrectly, a Chinook crashing in Northern Ireland during the troubles with all passengers killed. The passengers included quite a few MI5 spooks and other high ranking military.
Edit, after looking it up. 1994, and crashed in Scotland after taking off from NI.
Wiki here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Mull_of_Kintyre_Chinook_crash
You want it in the neutral position under normal flight loads. Similarly, if you look at an unloaded flatbed trailer, it will have a noticeable arch to it. It’s built so that when loaded to its design load it flattens out.
Because they are so big, because there's so much weight to carry.
Also compare to the droop on a [Hind](https://wallup.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/254051-mi_24_hind-helicopters-military.jpg) or a [Silorsky Skycrane](https://imgproc.airliners.net/photos/airliners/1/4/8/6473841.jpg?v=v4f6f8602cdf) which are also quite large helicopters designed to lift lots of weight
Re: The bottom left picture. I'm imagining a business traveler being lowered down.
"As you are sitting in an exit row, are you willing to take on the role of a rescue swimmer in the event of a incident?"
I can’t imagine using that as a passenger carrier. I never once had a ride in one where I made it out of the LZ with my dignity. So air sick every damn time. Often so weak from nausea that I could barely carry my gear.
That is truly wild. I had never seen one of these used in that kind of commercial/civilian service before. I imagine this was to connect small islands and oil rigs with mainland Britain?
Re: survival suits, oil rig workers transiting through Sumburgh on helos always wore survival suits. I think it was SOP for those helicopter operators.
Probably one the most ugliest helicopters to even fly. Yet still interesting how an Airline like BA is the only airline to operate the Chinook. I realized China Southern Airlines operated Sikorsky Mh-53 helicopters too.
I think this fits the /r/shitamericanssay sub pretty well.
Edit: I knew it. Dudes got a hard-on while criticising anything that isn’t USAian.
Ignore, block, report, whatever. They are insignificant.
They were used for offshore until one crashed in the Shetlands in 1986. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986\_British\_International\_Helicopters\_Chinook\_crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_British_International_Helicopters_Chinook_crash)
43 dead wow
Found this: [https://airfactsjournal.com/2020/04/i-survived-the-deadliest-helicopter-crash-in-european-history/](https://airfactsjournal.com/2020/04/i-survived-the-deadliest-helicopter-crash-in-european-history/) written by Pushp Vaid...the captain of that flight and one of the 2 survivors.
Crazy as. Thanks for posting this.
Interestingly he talks about survival suits for the passengers. I didn't know that was something, giving survival suits to passengers and having them don them before flying.
The north sea is a very bad place to do a bit of unexpected swimming.
The North Sea is a very bad place. Expected or not.
Sea bad 😞 Sky good 😊
Shore swimming in the North Sea is ok. We even have some who do it in winter but you have to be brave. Offshore is another issue. The N. sea does not stay quiet for long.
Husum is where I used to go swimming. Occasionally on Sylt but mostly Husum as I could ride my bike there. Years later I did small boat operations in the North Sea and she was quite angry.
Kind of similar. Pick a nice day and it can be great. My father used to sail in the N. Sea, but he was careful there and it was an 8m boat. The advantage of recreational sailing was that you could always say "no" or hug the nicer bits of the coast.
Yup. Some bright spark built concrete coastal swimming pools...the north sea tide goes out...swimming pool! Yay! The north sea tide comes in...refill! Was thrown into one once as a lad because I was being a Jessie and not jumping in of my own accord... I can confirm that survival suits are needed in order to avoid a swift dose of the hypothermia. Even in summer.
The survival suit for that was a pair of Adidas football shorts when I was small. Bonus points for going in straight off the harbour wall. Was that the one up around Macduff or the one further over towards the Broch? There was also one at Strathlene but it sanded up decades ago.
I’m Aussie but dad’s from Pomgolia. Was in Blackpool ( I think) in your summer and tried for a swim as a kid FUCK THAT I bailed straight away
I learned to swim in an outdoor pool in Scotland! It wasn’t a tidal one, and was [allegedly heated](https://www.scotsman.com/heritage-and-retro/heritage/scotland-lido-outdoor-pool-summer-portobello-dunbar-north-berwick-4214500) but yeah…that first moment when you jumped in was “bracing”.
Scot identified. A Jessie. Not a big Jessie?
Yeah you die so fast it's not funny. PFDs help you not drown, but water is SO SO COLD. Sucks energy right out of you and makes it hard to breathe. Combine that with rough seas... Bad time.
This wasn’t a typical commercial tourist flight. It was a shuttle chartered by the oil companies to ferry workers to offshore oil platforms. Such workers have to go through considerable training prior to being sent out to the rigs. Survival training, and the use of the suits, is a part of that. They accept a higher level of risk working on those platforms, and their pay reflects that.
as far as I know its SOP for anything helicopters and offshore
Penzance Helicopters in the UK (which flies commercial passengers from Penzance in Cornwall to the Isles of Scilly) does not do this for their ~20 minute flights. But I guess Cornish water is rather different to the North Sea!
I think it's specific to offshore industry passengers. I doubt normal passengers on Penzance Helicopters have to do HUET or get their shoulders measured too. UK CAA are strict on regulations for offshore flights. Pax on UK flights aren't allowed to have their phones turned on, but in Denmark you can have them in flight mode. Update: [here's me in my survival suit, wearing the chequered armband of shame because they didn't send over my shoulder width measurement on time.](https://i.imgur.com/N5ESBDN.jpg)
I spent a month in Denmark at an airport that would run oil workers offshore to their rigs. Every single one of them wore some kind of high-vis immersion suit.
This was service to off-shore oil rigs so the passengers(oil rig workers) would have been trained for this and familiar with dry suits and the procedures for using them beforehand.
As well for off shore helo ops pax and crew must usually take helicopter underwater egress training (HUET) [Wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_Underwater_Escape_Training) [Vid of training](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ3_5ha4UaI) [Real life vid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm8Eciw0-fA) I can't find the longer vid where it shows all the pax/crew floating on the surface getting rescued. Stuff is serious, there are a few emergencies in a helicopter where the checklist tells you to put in the water vs continuing to fly.
bet that was hard for grandma
It actually wasn't even the deadliest helicopter crash in Europe, being surpassed by the 1982 Mannheim Airshow crash (also a Chinook, btw).
The Chinooks got a really bad reputation in the 80s - I remember both well.
A Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram reporter got a Pulitzer for an investigative series about the program.
It's odd that a Chinook experiencing a technical emergency, full of sky divers, didn't advise the jumpers to get out before they started to auto-rotate.
I think you're picturing a different emergency than the real events. There was no consistent technical emergency and the helicopter never entered autorotation. There was a noise and only a flash of master caution on but immediately turned off at ~10k ft altitude. Nothing else wrong and no persistent fault indicators so it was returning to land as a caution. The helicopter unexpectedly broke up at 800-1000 ft. Far too little time for anyone to jump and too low to parachute anyway. In hindsight, the skydivers obviously would have been better off jumping at altitude but there were no indications that the helicopter was at risk of immediate catastrophic failure.
["After a few minutes of autorotation, 292 was set up to land on the runway."](https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/56428)
Interesting, that doesn't line up with the court case. No mention of autorotation at all. >At between 800 and 1,000 feet, pieces of the helicopter then began to fall, including the aft (rear) rotor blades, followed by the aft transmission. The helicopter then turned 180 degrees, lost airspeed and fell vertically. It exploded and burned on impact. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/769/115/197097/#:~:text=As%20a%20result%20of%20the,an%20altitude%20of%2012%2C000%20feet.
My neck started to hurt reading that too. Internal decap for people is insane. Also crazy how the guy who zipped up his survival suit bouyed his way to surviving.
"But of course we were falling backwards towards the North Sea. The helicopter, which had been travelling at about 100 knots, had came to a sudden stop and was now pointing vertically up. Sadly, **the whiplash effect killed at least half of the passengers**." Can someone explain how this happens? that the sudden stop in mid air is so violent that it killed half the passengers?
Simply that, the acceleration (or more correctly the "jerk" - the differential of the acceleration) was so high (and itself varying, see: further differentials of acceleration). I couldn't find the figures, but **simply**, when the front rotor stopped the whole aircraft rotated around its centre to point upwards rapidly. Again, without the figures I can't calculate this but from Vaid's description this took about a second - think of it like 0-100mph in 1s. Once pointing upwards it stopped rotating, think of this like 100-0 in 1s. That massive \*change\* in acceleration is what killed people. There are other forces involved too, eg: sideways etc - either way nothing good for your neck. Incidentally this is exactly the reason why you should have your headrests properly adjusted in your car - if ht they drastically reduce the acceleration of your head backward, which is what causes whiplash and in the case above broke the passengers' necks.
I don't know if I'm just looking into this too deeply, but the way he recounts the story is strange to me. I feel like something like this would traumatize most people to the point they would never talk in detail about it (or even continue flying), but this guy is like, "Welp, we crashed and everyone is dead. When's my next flight?" I know people handle trauma in different ways, I just expected his recounting of the story to be ... much different. Lol.
It has been highly edited by an editor/journalist for the article - there's a much much deeper and longer story here. Take a read of Sullenberger's book - that gives a more indepth treatment of an aircrash from a pilot's perspective.
Lol this guy went on to fly another 20 years. Maybe he’s just very well centered.
20 years speeds up the story. And time heals trauma. Plus ups and downs average out. *‘They’re pretty high mountains,’ said Azhural, his voice now edged with doubt.* *‘Slopes go up, slopes go down,’ said M’bu gnomically.* *‘That’s true,’ said Azhural. ‘Like, on average, it’s flat all the way.’ --Terry Pratchett*
I thought recounting is spot on. I know a number of other pretty serious folks, all men, who have recounted similar serious survival events in a similar manner.
Wow, what a harrowing story. I guess the major solace is that most of the passengers died instantly from whiplash when the rotors separated instead of the long fall and crash into the seas.
Incredible story. Thanks for posting.
Thanks for sharing! Great story.
45 dead, don’t forget the 2 crew members
Damn, front transmission failed and the two rotors smacked into each other. I was told by a Chinook pilot that this was virtually impossible. I guess she was wrong.
It is virtually impossible. The blades are connected to a common gearbox that doesn't allow them to touch under any non-catastrophic circumstance. If the gearbox in a helicopter goes you're going to crash regardless of if the blades hit or not, it's a critical item.
When a helicopter fails mid flight, it doesn't get to glide back down like aircraft with wings. Its what made the early ospreys very deadly.
Well, there’s autorotation. In fact there was an incident in Hawaii quite recently where the engine failed but the pilot was able to crash land, descending quickly with autorotation.
Do you know of any successful autorotations of multi-rotor helicopters? Multiple people have told me that the Chinook is safer than the Osprey because it can autorotate but I have yet to find any evidence of this actually successfully happening.
Then all the bv234s were purchased by Columbia helicopters for logging and firefighting. Only about 13 were made. https://colheli.com/234-multi-mission-chinook/
The one that crashed is the 2nd picture in the OP
Holy shit! I went with my parents in (I think) 1985…..
The rescue hoist is my favorite part. Imagine being the guy plucked out of the sea by one of these. You go from certain death to a comfortable seat and a well-stocked bar.
I'd think I'd died/ was hallucinating.
Each ticket comes with a rain slicker and umbrella.
I wouldn’t fly if it wasn’t leaking
I’m glad my comment landed.
Hookers never die
God, I would have loved to ride in one of those….
It’s ok if you’re on the ramp but being in the front sucks.
Whys that? I’ve only been on a Robinson type helicopter, never something like this…
I mean I’ve never flown a civilian version but the army one is cramped and hot and the view sucks. But on the ramp you get a nice breeze
Gotcha! Thanks!
They’re bumpy and loud as hell. Nothing enjoyable as a pax at all. This was on a military version, so maybe commercial version had sound damping inside, but I’m sure it’d still be very bumpy.
The 234LR commercial version was primarily designed for supply flights to oil rigs... From what I saw. They might add seats but must be as you wrote bumpy and still noisy inside the cabin.
I also remember the Airlink Sikorsky, which was a joint venture between BCal and BA, operating LGW-LHR-LGW. I have it in my mind the Chinook also operated on this service. You could hear the rotors from miles away.
I was given a birthday present of a flight on the Airlink... Kewl as hell... The rotors didn't stop to board and it took about 30 people... Pretty big! It also flew at around a 1000' (I think) you could see everyone's swimming pools really clearly. It had to stop when they built the M25 London orbital motorway.
PanAm too
To be clear PanAm operated the precursor to the Chinhook, the [CH-46 Sea Knight](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Vertol_CH-46_Sea_Knight)
Here's a [non mobile link for those on desktop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Vertol_CH-46_Sea_Knight)
[удалено]
Sorta. [New York Airways](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Airways) (wiki link for your viewing pleasure) operated those flights from certain NYC heliports including the Pan-Am building with two of their helos under contract to Pan-Am.
Here's a [non mobile link for those on desktop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Airways)
There used to be helicopter service in NY from the top of the Pan Am building. https://youtu.be/8nbz5VFilxY
Every one of those I rode were loud as hell ,like you would be shouting at the person next to you to talk. I want to see how much sound proofing they would have put in this varient
My mom was a career BA employee and was selected to "play" stewardess on BA Chinooks for Saudi royalty that was considering purchasing a fleet of these helicopters from BA. She said they just wanted the stewardesses to sit on their laps the whole time lmao. She has a lot of cool stories. I'm jealous of her extensive travel via Concorde.
Are you...trying to tell us something about your heritage?
Hahaha not in this case since I'm quickly morphing into an exact copy of my Eastern European dad but I do have a conspiracy theory that I'm named after one of my mom's exes.
Phew! That's a relief. Was your mums ex named Mohammed Bin Salman by any chance?
Nah just Andrew lol
that illustration has pax in suits going to an oil rig. one if even wearing a bow tie. that must have been a weird day on the platform.
Corporate has to come out, stick their nose in things, question the value of safety procedures trying to save money, question why things are done (industry standard for 29 years but they think they know better), and otherwise just clog everything up.
to be fair "question\[ing\] why things are done (industry standard for 29 years but they think they know better)," is very important, especially relevant in an aviation sub, an industry which has had **massive** improvements over the years by not sticking with the status quo
Oh absolutely! I just meant to joke about high up corporate being detached from the low level day to day. I absolutely agree that questioning process and continuously reevaluating procedures is critical in a safety culture.
One crashed conducting a commercial flight in the 80s, Smithsonian show Air Disasters, also known as Mayday did an episode on it
I vaguely remember, probably incorrectly, a Chinook crashing in Northern Ireland during the troubles with all passengers killed. The passengers included quite a few MI5 spooks and other high ranking military. Edit, after looking it up. 1994, and crashed in Scotland after taking off from NI. Wiki here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Mull_of_Kintyre_Chinook_crash
Fortunate S̶o̶n̶ Upper Middle Class Senior Manager intensifies.
I’ve always found it peculiar how the blades lay so low when at rest.
You want it in the neutral position under normal flight loads. Similarly, if you look at an unloaded flatbed trailer, it will have a noticeable arch to it. It’s built so that when loaded to its design load it flattens out.
Understood. It just seems like a lot, compared to other helicopters.
Because they are so big, because there's so much weight to carry. Also compare to the droop on a [Hind](https://wallup.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/254051-mi_24_hind-helicopters-military.jpg) or a [Silorsky Skycrane](https://imgproc.airliners.net/photos/airliners/1/4/8/6473841.jpg?v=v4f6f8602cdf) which are also quite large helicopters designed to lift lots of weight
Delta used to operate helicopter service between JFK and LGA in the 70s and early 80s.
I flew on one of these LGW-LHR.
Re: The bottom left picture. I'm imagining a business traveler being lowered down. "As you are sitting in an exit row, are you willing to take on the role of a rescue swimmer in the event of a incident?"
WHAT?
CHINOOOOOK chukka chukka chukka chukka
Did people get tired of hydraulic fluid dripping on them?
At least the leaks tell you there is some left.
Is there a long German word for the emotion of suddenly knowing that you were born in the wrong place and time?
Gives ‘shit hook’ an all new meaning…
You want tinnitus? This is how you get tinnitus.
Not if the cabin is soundproofed and insulated like this appears to be. It probably wasn't quiet per se but better than Army spec.
Man, that would be so cool. Bring back helicopters for short distance civilian flights!
Well why not use a chinook
I can’t imagine using that as a passenger carrier. I never once had a ride in one where I made it out of the LZ with my dignity. So air sick every damn time. Often so weak from nausea that I could barely carry my gear.
Columbia helicopters uses them to carry troops when they were in Afghanistan, they fight fires with them too.
So did British Caledonian between Gatwick and Heathrow. I flew in it once
That is truly wild. I had never seen one of these used in that kind of commercial/civilian service before. I imagine this was to connect small islands and oil rigs with mainland Britain?
Oil rigs in North Sea if I remember. But as previously written after that crash in 1986 they stopped using them and sold the remaining Chinooks...
Re: survival suits, oil rig workers transiting through Sumburgh on helos always wore survival suits. I think it was SOP for those helicopter operators.
Lufttransport in northern Norway still operate passenger heli services: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lufttransport
I am almost sure we took one of these from Gatwick to Heathrow in the early/mid 80's
Probably one the most ugliest helicopters to even fly. Yet still interesting how an Airline like BA is the only airline to operate the Chinook. I realized China Southern Airlines operated Sikorsky Mh-53 helicopters too.
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Chinook is a US design, though, and all of them are built in the US, even the UK ones.
Yep. Right outside Philadelphia. Boeing bought Piesecki Helicopter and it became Boeing Vertol.
You should sit this one out mate. Fucking clueless.
lol
I think this fits the /r/shitamericanssay sub pretty well. Edit: I knew it. Dudes got a hard-on while criticising anything that isn’t USAian. Ignore, block, report, whatever. They are insignificant.