When the FAA held a public hearing to discuss the results of its investigation into the crash of the Sikorsky S-76B helicopter in Calabasas, California, in January of 2020, killing nine, including former basketball superstar Kobe Bryant, it came to the conclusion that everyone expected it to: The pilot flew into clouds, got spatially disoriented, lost control and crashed into terrain. It is as simple an accident explanation as it is a common one. The National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates aircraft accidents, said that similar crashes happen on the order of twice a year, with similarly devastating consequences.
Our takeaway as pilots is simple, too. Don’t do that. It’s an easy thing to say… and teach and even preach. But doing so doesn’t seem to change the steady occurrence of these tragic mishaps in either the helicopter and fixed-wing aircraft segments. The subject of why smart pilots fly by visual reference into the clouds, lose control and then subsequently crash is for a different article, and there is much to be said about it.
But that wasn’t all the the NTSB discussed during its hearing. Board members also brought up several concerns that the investigation into the Calabasas crash triggered, some of which seemed common ground for board members and investigators alike. With others, there was sharp disagreement.
Before I dive into five different areas of interest sparked by the investigation, a quick note on how the NTSB does its job and what the limits of its powers are.
The NTSB investigates accidents and publishes a final report on each one of them, if at all possible, with a statement of probable cause, if, again, that is possible to determine. This safety board does not have the power to make regulations or mandate equipment or system changes, nor to regulate pilot training or flight privileges or limitations. What it can do is make recommendations to their regulatory companion organization, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
So in this case, as in all others, the NTSB might think that the crash could have been avoided had some different rules been in place beforehand. They might even be adamant about it, but all they can do is make suggestions, and those carry no force of law. The FAA will listen to each and every one, but it has no obligation to act. In fact, in most cases, they do nothing about the recommendation, and for some very good reasons, too.
If it were up to the idealistic organization that is the NTSB, aviation would be even more heavily regulated than it is now. And that could have a devastating effect on every segment of aviation. And that’s not just me saying. That’s the very reason the two organizations were created as they were, with separate mandates and responsibilities. Amazingly, it works very well.
With all that in mind, here are the fascinating though little discussed other possible NTSB safety recommendations that might arise from its investigation into the Calabasas crash.
- Mandatory Terrain Avoidance Gear: This one seems a no-brainer, but the chief investigator, Bill English, said that this accident was not even associated with the presence or absence of terrain avoidance gear, known as Helicopter Terrain Avoidance and Warning System, or HTAWS. Such systems keep an eye on the terrain so the pilot doesn’t inadvertently fly an aircraft under full control in the side of a mountain. Such accidents are known as CFIT, and HTAWS would indeed help prevent them. This wasn’t such an accident. As you probably know, Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT) is an accident type that has been for all practical purposes eliminated after aviation safety organizations worldwide mandated TAWS for commercial airliners. For helicopters that fly commercially, there are so many diverse missions and so much of it is nap-of-the-earth flying, HTAWS, it could be argued, might be more distraction than help. The NTSB seems to get that.
- Trip Completion Pressure: There’s been a lot of speculation that because of the nature of providing flights for very wealthy people, the wealthy person in this case being Kobe Bryant, a global sports and entertainment superstar who had (and has) Massachusetts-Kennedy-level status in Southern California, he might have exerted undue pressure on the pilot to complete the trip instead of turning around. The NTSB looked for such evidence and found none. Zero. Investigators and board members instead raised the issue of pilots being too friendly with their clients and putting the pressure on themselves to complete trips, which is nearly as speculative. The board offered no substantiation for this conjecture and no thoughts on how it might be avoided. The truth is, pilots get to know their regular passengers/clients and sometimes, often in fact, develop close bonds with them. This is a good thing because by that point you are flying what amounts to family members. The effect, if anything, is a positive one.
- Flight and Voice Recorders: We don’t know what communications, if any, were made between the pilot and his passengers along the way because there was no cockpit voice recorder in the helicopter. Whatever was or wasn’t said between passengers and pilot, all of whom died in the crash, shall forever remain a mystery. Would it have changed the NTSB’s conclusions about the crash, that the pilot crashed after flying under visual rules into clouds and losing control and crashing into rising terrain? It would not have. The absence of a fight recorder, likewise, would tell us nothing we don’t already know based on the millions of data points investigators had to work with. This crash wasn’t a mystery.
- Helicopter IFR Mandate? If the FAA were to mandate terrain awareness gear in helicopters, it would be very expensive for operators. Mandating IFR? It would be staggeringly so. Not only that, but the vast majority of helicopter operations are conducted VFR, and they need to be. In the case of the Calabasas crash, had it flown under instrument rules it almost certainly would have safely completed the flight. But that was a flight from one airport to a destination that is another airport. That doesn’t take into account the tens of thousands of flights ever year that don’t use the National Air Space infrastructure because they don’t need to and because they can’t. Medevac flights. Search and rescue. Logging. Personnel transport to remote locations. An IFR mandate for commercial ops would be expensive on an industry that has big costs to control already. The NTSB, as much as a couple of board members seemed to like the idea, is not going there.
- Special VFR reforms? Special VFR is the reduced-visibility rules that a pilot can request for flying in certain airspace areas. It helps pilots stay legal while still getting where they’re going when they are in or passing through certain kinds of airspace, like that which surrounds big airports. Some have suggested that this is an area of regulation where some real safety reform might take place, but the NTSB didn’t seem interested in the topic, and we’re glad. Special VFR is useful under very limited circumstances, and the pilot of the Sikorsky that later crashed used it to traverse busy airspace. He was not under special VFR and had not been for some time at the time of the crash. The question of whether he had legal minimums to even ask for Special VFR is moot. The NTSB concluded that he probably did. Besides, it had no bearing on the mishap.
Often after a high-profile crash, big safety initiatives get momentum and the FAA responds to the NTSB’s recommendations with new rules. This happened with TWA 800, which resulted in new fuel tank practices being mandated; with the American Airlines Cali, Columbia, disaster, which hastened the mandating of terrain avoidance, gear; and with a series of midair collisions between small planes and large in the ’60s and ’70s that helped usher in a wave of transponder and special use airspace regulations.
In this case, we have a crash that was caused by human error. The prescription is to try to better understand why flying into clouds on a visual rules flight and without referencing the flight instruments remains such a persistent accident cause. And then, of course, if we do get new, deeper understandings of the human factors behind such crashes, education comes next. Those steps might not prevent future tragedies like the Kobe Bryant crash, but they could very well help cut down on such losses substantially.
