The pilot ignores low repeated low fuel warnings resulting in the deaths of 10 people.

No criminal charges to be brought.

What a devastating outcome for those innocent folks families who were enjoying a pint.

And the two police officers, and their families. Who are you going to charge?

Did the pilot die in the crash ?

Trimix

Member
Did the pilot die in the crash ?

Aye pilot and 2 police died too.

Not really sure what a conviction achieves really, for the families I mean….

The pilot ignores low repeated low fuel warnings

Obviously impossible to understand the context, but I suppose you have to question if the fuel warning signals were effective.

A very sad outcome.

Obviously impossible to understand the context, but I suppose you have to question if the fuel warning signals were effective.

Both fuel transfer switches were off. Even without fuel warnings at least one of these should have been on (as the pumps feed from the main tank to the supply tanks). Still a very odd situation for an experienced pilot

^agreed.

However, 5 audible warnings each one had to be suppressed.

It’s just a desperate series of events which led to these deaths.

It would appear the pilot knew better than the machine. I assume he thought he would make it over the water and back to the landing site in time. Despite an 11 minute window to land within the warning period.

Horrific.

Nowt new from the aaib report of quite some time ago. Apart from no whines from Sturgeon about how long it took to decide.

Its not quite as cut and dried as its been put here.
Have a look at the PPRUNE (<<<LINK) thread on this.

Helicomparator. I gave 2 days of evidence to the enquiry. About a week after the tragedy I was flying an aircraft that had both red warnings come on in flight. The tanks showed 47/26/43 on the gauges and the amber/yellow fuel warning did not show. I landed very quickly, the tanks were drained and were nearly empty. We nearly repeated the accident. So the sherif WAS talking about this scenario.

ultimately, the conclusion is correct. I was confused but believed the “worst” warning. It appears Dave didn’t.

My argument ALWAYS was that whilst it was pilot error, I believed there were possible mitigating circumstances where Dave was confused by what he saw. I’m glad the sheriff has understood this and accepted that he may have been confused.

For the record, the court was totally fair with me, they gave me a hard time but they were also prepared to listen and consider my answers. Hopefully the families can find some peace now

Yep loads of detail on PPrune.

Suprised there is no mandatory CVR on police choppers but there should be.

@winston it was one of the recommendations of the AAIB report I think, not sure if it’s in place on not yet though.

I think they are, one of the top brass said so on the news this week.

Suprised there is no mandatory CVR on police choppers but there should be.

This is about to be fitted and at some point it the future CCTV to record movements in the cockpit according to a police spokesman on the news.

I object to the finding that the pilot made a “conscious decision” and “took a chance” that the alert was erroneos, that seems a bit subjectice to me.

Not sure I agree. An alarm goes off 5 times, you’re choice is to land asap and check it out, or keep flying because you don’t believe it. The latter choice is definitely taking a chance even if you think it’s a very slim one

For whatever reason he thought there was still fuel available to the engines and tragically there wasn’t. We’ll never know what compelled him to carry on. Press-on-itis no doubt had a part to play as they were so close to the heliport.

I read the report when it was first available but can’t remember all the details, I’m sure there was something about a possible discrepancy between the low fuel warning and what the gauge showed on other EC35s.

Eat the pudding’s quote from PPRUNE seems to back that up.

Press-on-itis no doubt had a part to play as they were so close to the heliport.

3.5miles isn’t that close when you might have to autorotate

Not sure I agree. An alarm goes off 5 times, you’re choice is to land asap and check it out, or keep flying because you don’t believe it. The latter choice is definitely taking a chance even if you think it’s a very slim one.

Easy to say, but we don’t know what was going on in the aircraft, what distractions there were, how the pilot was feeling or what other factors were playing out at the time.

My argument ALWAYS was that whilst it was pilot error, I believed there were possible mitigating circumstances where Dave was confused by what he saw. I’m glad the sheriff has understood this and accepted that he may have been confused.

Thankfully it looks like the Sheriff agreed. The safety improvements brought in by things like Crew Resource Management are ongoing. We need to maintain that culture of improvement rather than blame.

3.5miles isn’t that close when you might have to autorotate

Actually only 1.8miles, which assuming he really didn’t think he would have to autorotate is close.

A CVR would have revealed any input from other crew at the time of the alarms. In hindsight it seems crazy such devices were not fitted as a matter of course. The only good that may come from this are the measures recommended be implemented asap.

The Clutha pilot chose to ignore the alarms, regardless that’s inexplicable.

The test pilot heeded the warnings and it seems was lucky to land.

Pal of mine flies helicopters for a living, and used to fly for the police.

I was astonished at how ‘manual’ the fuel system is when he explained it. Apparently every time they move to a hover from moving, or vice versa, because the attitude changes they have to shift whether they use the front/no/rear pumps from the auxiliary tanks to the main tank (to stop the pumps running dry). There’s no interlock-type system to prevent all of the pumps being off at once, and in the police-type work they could be switching the pumps virtually constantly.

Any system that relies on someone remembering to do that (amongst many other things they have to worry about) seems like a prime candidate for some sort of emergency automated override.

Dead pilot not being prosecuted is fairly easy to explain.

Driver of the Croydon crash train not being prosecuted I don’t understand at all.

“Can’t be my fault, i was asleep”

Actually only 1.8miles, which assuming he really didn’t think he would have to autorotate is close.

My bad, thought it was flying from Linthouse by the time of the crash

Not sure I agree. An alarm goes off 5 times, you’re choice is to land asap and check it out, or keep flying because you don’t believe it. The latter choice is definitely taking a chance even if you think it’s a very slim one

I’m just being pedantic, I think, but it’s the “conscious decision” element that bugs me – of course, if he did consciously ignore the warnings, he was taking a heck of a chance, but I don’t know if it can definitively be said that he consciously did, not least because it would seem to be a remarkably illogical thing to do.

how ‘manual’ the fuel system is when he explained it.

That does seem an oddity.
Is human more reliable than multiple sensors and pumps? I don’t know.

Noted here – 2 priming pumps were found “on” and they are only used at start up. Did he think he’d put the transfer pumps on? The Manualness of the whole thing astounded me as well.

Glasgow helicopter crash mystery: 76kg of fuel in tank

Yeah – I remember seeing that when the report was originally published. It notes that both the priming switches and transfer switches could have been knocked during or after impact, but it’s certainly odd that two fuel switches that should have been on were off and two adjacent fuel switches that should have been off were on.

Makes you wonder if he turned the prime switches on in response to the low fuel caution, and believed that the subsequent warnings were simply because the supply tanks hadn’t replenished? Particularly as at several points after the initial caution, the caution cleared itself.

But the overall arrangement does seem very manual and error prone. If I’m reading the report correctly, there’s nothing to remind you to turn a pump back on once it’s resubmerged in fuel, and no immediate warning if, when you turn off an unsubmerged pump, the other pump isn’t running. Seems like it’d be quite easy to end up with neither pump running.

During flight the pilot has to routinely respond to warnings that pumps need to be turned off, but the low fuel caution requires you to turn them back on. All of which needs to be done whilst flying a helicopter in the dark.

The other thing that struck me is that the manufacturers went to the effort of installing NVM to record the last 31 state changes from the warning unit, but didn’t take the extra step of adding any sort of timestamp to the record. Even if completely unsynchronised with a real clock, just knowing the number of seconds between the warnings would make the NVM massively more useful.

No criminal charges to be brought.

https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/deceased-suspects-cps-policy-charging-decisions

If there wasn’t any indication that anyone else was at fault (eg manager forcing aircraft to be out longer than the pilot thought he had fuel for) then it’s the pilot who would be blamed.

It goes against our system of justice to prosecute a dead person anyway as one of the mainstays is that a person has to be presented with what they alleged to have done wrong and given a chance to defend themselves which can’t happen in this case.