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Swift action by the pilot of the helicopter that crashed Monday helped avoid even more damage and possible casualties, one aviation expert says.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A local aviation expert is praising the skills of the pilot of the helicopter that crashed on Highway 50 in Sacramento Monday night, saying his quick maneuvering avoided houses and cars.
“He only had mere seconds before the helicopter impacted the ground after lifting off from the [UC Davis Medical Center] helicopter pad,” said Tommy Ishii, a Sacramento-based aviation expert with decades of experience piloting planes.
After Monday night’s crash, he got on the phone with fellow pilots—including helicopter pilots. He said they all agree: the man piloting the helicopter did the right thing, given the circumstances.
“It’s been absolutely just astonishing seeing what the pilot did to get that helicopter in an area to minimize the collateral damage, where he was flying from that helicopter pad on the top of that hospital, down to the freeway,” Ishii said.
For emergency landings at night, he said, pilots are trained to look for dark spots.
“You don’t want to shoot for anything that has lights because what lights entail is cars, buildings, telephone poles, some structure – some sort of potential life there,” Ishii said. “It appears from my vantage point that he might have been aiming for a cemetery that was across the freeway – there’s no lights out in the cemetery – and found that he didn’t have the energy to get to that point and ultimately found the break in the traffic and put it down in such a way that nobody got hurt in the houses. Nobody got hurt in their cars. The pilot, I think, and the crew did a fantastic job in that regard.”
After the crash, there was no fire. This particular helicopter was equipped with something called a crash-resistant fuel system.
That’s a system “intended to increase safety in the event of a survivable crash by either decreasing the likelihood of, or delaying, post-crash fires,” according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
Federal law requires all new helicopter models certified after April 5, 2020 to have crash-resistant fuel systems. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, the helicopter that crashed Monday is an Airbus EC130 T2, manufactured and certified in 2021.
According to the NTSB, this type of helicopter “has included crash-resistant fuel systems as standard equipment” for more than 13 years now.
A video of the crash, captured by a driver, shows a hissing plume of pressurized white fog pouring from the helicopter after the crash.
Ishii says that might be a part of the system.
“What we speculate – and my sources speculate – that the hissing at the end was the fire retardants. We have a fire-extinguishing capability in most all jet turbine powered aircraft, so that might have been the fire retardant distinguishing agent being let loose,” he said.
Unanswered questions include the cause of the crash—whether mechanical, pilot error or something else—and how much fuel was on board. Ishii said he’ll be watching to see what the reports from federal aviation and transportation safety experts have to say.
WATCH MORE ON ABC10 | FAA prompts investigation of helicopter crash on Highway 50 in Sacramento
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