Kobe Bryant crash: NTSB says that it was all the pilot’s fault

From a year ago… Aviation weather reports at the time of Kobe Bryant crash:

Assuming that it was bad weather that led to this accident, the engineering question is “Why couldn’t the $10 million helicopter fly itself away from obstacles, the way that a $400 DJI drone can?”

A Sikorsky is equipped with multiple computer-readable attitude sources so that the onboard processors know whether the machine is pitched or banked. It has multiple GPS position sensors so it knows where it is. It has at least one terrain database so it knows where the obstacles are. It has autopilot servos capable of maneuvering the aircraft. Why doesn’t it have the intelligence to say “You’re about to hit something, would you like me to take over and fly away from these obstacles and park on the ramp at the Van Nuys Airtel so that we can all relax?”

From 2019… New York helicopter crash: why not robot intelligence?

Thus we have a machine with autopilot servos that can manipulate cyclic and collective. The machine came with a glass cockpit so it also should have at least two digital attitude sources (whether the helicopter is pitched up, banked left, etc.). Finally, it almost surely had a GPS receiver and a digital terrain database, which would have included the obstacles of Manhattan.

Media coverage centered on the pilot’s lack of an instrument rating (example: CNN). (In fact, being capable of instrument flight does not help that much unless one is actually planning an IFR flight from airport to airport with established procedures for departure and approach/landing.)

Nobody seems to have asked “If it had autopilot servos, attitude sources, and a GPS, why couldn’t a $10 million helicopter fly itself through the low clouds, away from the buildings, and to the destination? A DJI drone would have been able to do that.”

We expect so much of our phones and so little from our aircraft!

The NTSB issued “Pilot’s Poor Decision Making, Spatial Disorientation, Led to Fatal Helicopter Crash” yesterday:

“Unfortunately, we continue to see these same issues influence poor decision making among otherwise experienced pilots in aviation crashes,” said NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt. “Had this pilot not succumbed to the pressures he placed on himself to continue the flight into adverse weather, it is likely this accident would not have happened. A robust safety management system can help operators like Island Express provide the support their pilots need to help them resist such very real pressures.”

The solution to the age-old problem of scud-running, in other words, is a bureaucrat with a safety management document, not a few lines of DJI-style code.

A 2006 photo from a Robinson R44 helicopter (picking it up at the factory and flying back to Boston). The LA freeways are easy to follow, but they climb up towards the clouds whenever there is a ridge.

Meanwhile, the “supersized DJI” world got a boost this week as United ordered eVTOL aircraft from “Archer” (not Piper Archers!).