Hi everyone,

The August issue of the magazine is back from the printer, so hopefully you'll be seeing it soon. Since it's been a little quiet on the blog front recently, I'm posting my editorial from that issue with some more thoughts on the Black Hawk 221 crash... This is already a topic on our forums, so please weigh in if you have something to add!

Safe flying,

Elan

Two years ago I had the privilege of doing some mountain flying training at the Canadian Helicopters School for Advanced Flight Training in Penticton, British Columbia. The school is highly respected around the world, and many international militaries send their pilots there for training. At the time of my visit, four US Army instructor pilots were wrapping up Canadian Helicopters’ full three-week mountain flying course.

This is a humbling program, and most pilots will learn a great deal from it, whatever their level of experience. More than anything, the training involves reading and paying attention to wind: in the mountains, wind will make you or break you.

On the last day of the course, one of the US Army students, an experienced Apache pilot, observed: “What I’ve realised is that in the Army, our solution is to add more power. Yeah, we could land into the wind – or we could put a bigger engine in our helicopter. We put in the bigger engine.”

Those words came back to me as I was reading the Black Hawk 221 Board of Inquiry Report, on the investigation into the 29 November 2006 crash of an Australian Army Black Hawk near Fiji. The accident occurred during practice of a special operations assault approach: an aggressive, flaring approach designed to deliver forces into hostile territory as quickly as possible. In this particular accident, a tail wind at termination was one of several factors that contributed directly to the crash. Indirect factors, according to the report, were a “trust in pilot ability and an overconfidence in the Black Hawk’s performance” in tail wind conditions.