William “Bill” Coultas of Cave Junction, Oregon says the National Transportation Safety Board ignored his testimony and came to the wrong conclusion about the cause of the helicopter crash on the Iron Complex fire in 2008 near Weaverville, California in which 9 firefighters and helicopter crew members died.
The NTSB concluded in their public meeting on December 7 that Carson Helicopters intentionally under-stated the weight of the helicopter and over-stated its performance in the documents they provided to the U.S. Forest Service when bidding on their firefighting contract. This led to the helicopter being overloaded, making it impossible for it to gain altitude when it attempted to take off from the Iron 44 helispot at 6,000 feet in the Trinity Alps.
Here is an excerpt from an article in the Mercury News:
…”I was speechless—I could not believe what I was hearing,” [Coultas] said after the NTSB report was released Tuesday. “I was there. I had the best seat in the house. I knew what happened.”
Coultas, 46, is still recovering from severe burns suffered in the August 2008 crash in Northern California that also killed pilot Roark Schwanenberg of Lostine.
Both Coultas and the Schwanenberg family have sued engine manufacturer General Electric, as well as Sikorsky and a maintenance company, Columbia Helicopters, citing engine failure, among other things.
They say the NTSB investigators were responsible for losing engine fuel control parts that would have backed up the copilot’s testimony.
“We want the truth to come out about the loss of engine parts and actual cause of the accident,” said Gregory A. Anderson, an attorney from Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., who represents both the Coultas and Schwanenberg families.
Lawyers for the three companies did not immediately respond to e-mails Friday from The Associated Press seeking comment on the litigation.
The NTSB concluded that aircraft owner Carson Helicopters Inc. of Merlin deliberately understated the weight of its Sikorsky S-61N helicopter.
The report also said both the U.S. Forest Service and the Federal Aviation Administration failed to notice the understatement.
Carson Helicopters said in a statement that a clogged fuel control unit and other issues were responsible for the crash. The company also laid the blame for underestimating the weight of the aircraft on the actions of an unnamed single manager.
In their public meeting on December 7 the NTSB said the fuel system parts played no role in the crash and that the engines were operating at full power as it attempted to take off.
It was announced last week that Carson Helicopters surrendered their FAA certificate, equivalent to a license to operate, but last year the company signed a contract with a subsidiary of Blackwater Worldwide (which recently changed their name to “Xe”) to use seven of their Sikorsky S-61 helicopters in Afghanistan.
This year, 2010, is shaping up to be the the quietest wildfire season in the United States since 1998, when measured by acres burned. If you separate Alaska from the rest of the country, through November 4, 2010 the lower 49 states have burned the fewest acres since 2004. Alaska can routinely have mega-fires, or a very quiet fire season, so adding their numbers in with the rest of the country can really skew the trend. For example, in 2004, four times as many acres were blackened in Alaska than in the other 49 states combined.
The following numbers were obtained from the http://www.nifc.gov/ site, which has had problems recently and is not always available. The 2010 stats here go through November 4, 2010.
(note: the number of acres burned in Alaska in 2008 was 32,648)
The stats for the number of acres burned in all 50 states from 1960 through 2010 are below.
On December 1 Wildfire Today told you about the house near Escondido, California that contained 9 to 12 pounds of unstable high explosives, including HTMD, PETN, and ETN, which is the largest cache of its type ever found in the United States. Local authorities determined that the safest method of dealing with the explosives was to conduct a prescribed fire of the house.
Firefighters applied foam or gel to a newly constructed barrier wall (16′ high and 75′ long on a neighbor’s property), cut holes in the roof, and opened the windows of the house. Ignition was delayed due to the weather. An inversion caused the mixing height to be inadequate earlier, and they wanted the smoke to disperse into the higher atmosphere, rather than impact the millions of residents in San Diego County.
Yesterday we provided live coverage of the National Transportation Safety Board’s all-day meeting about the 2008 crash of the Sikorsky S-61N helicopter on the Iron Complex fire near Weaverville, California in which nine firefighters died. The pilot-in-command, a U.S. Forest Service check pilot, and seven firefighters were fatally injured; the copilot and three firefighters were seriously injured. The helicopter was operated by Carson Helicopters, Inc. of Grants Pass, Oregon.
According to the NTSB, there was “intentional wrong-doing” by Carson Helicopters that under-stated the weight of the helicopter and over-stated the performance of the helicopter in the documents they provided to the USFS when bidding on their firefighting contract. The NTSB estimated that the actual empty weight of the helicopter was 13,845 pounds, while Carson Helicopters stated in their contract proposal that the weight was 12,013 pounds. For the purpose of load calculations on the day of the crash, the pilot assumed the weight to be 12,408 pounds, which was 1,437 pounds less than the actual weight estimated by the NTSB. According to the NTSB, for the mission of flying the firefighters off the helispot, the helicopter was already over the allowable weight even without the firefighters on board.
In addition, here is an excerpt from the NTSB report:
The altered takeoff (5-minute) power available chart that was provided by Carson Helicopters eliminated a safety margin of 1,200 pounds of emergency reserve power that had been provided for in the load calculations.
The pilot-in-command followed a Carson Helicopters procedure, which was not approved by the helicopter’s manufacturer or the U.S. Forest Service, and used above-minimum specification torque in the load calculations, which exacerbated the error already introduced by the incorrect empty weight and the altered takeoff power available chart, resulting in a further reduction of 800 pounds to the safety margin intended to be included in the load calculations.
The incorrect information—the empty weight and the power available chart—provided by Carson Helicopters and the company procedure of using above-minimum specification torque misled the pilots to believe that the helicopter had the performance capability to hover out of ground effect with the manifested payload when, in fact, it did not.
The NTSB has notified the Department of Transportation’s Inspector General that Carson’s actions may merit a criminal investigation.
The NTSB and the FAA seem to have a rocky relationship. Some of the recommendations that the NTSB makes to the FAA following accident investigations are ignored, which frustrates the NTSB. This was evident a couple of times in the meeting yesterday. The AP reports on an example of this tension that affected the NTSB’s ability to investigate the Iron 44 fire fatal accident:
Two months after the accident, the FAA office in charge of overseeing Carson received letters from two pilots with knowledge of Carson’s operations who expressed concern that the company was miscalculating helicopter weights, investigators said.
Investigators said that if FAA had provided NTSB with that information at the time, it would have helped them figure out sooner that the weight calculations were faulty. FAA was a party to the accident investigation and its inspectors were aware of the investigation, they said.
However, FAA dismissed the allegations and didn’t provide the letters to NTSB until about a year later after the investigators made a general request for documents related to the agency’s oversight of Carson after the crash, investigators said.
Carson surrenders FAA certificate, but may still be operating in Afghanistan
It was reported by the FAA after the NTSB meeting on Tuesday that Carson Helicopters has surrendered their FAA Certificate, which is equivalent to an operating license. However, they may still be flying for the military as a subcontractor. The Mail Tribune in Medford, Oregon reported in January, 2009 that Carson Helicopters signed a contract with a subsidiary of Blackwater Worldwide (which recently changed their name to “Xe”) to use seven of their Sikorsky S-61 helicopters in Afghanistan. The contract, worth $605 million through 2013, is for the helicopters to transport supplies; they will not be involved in combat.
Fuel Control Unit missing
Conspiracy theory enthusiasts will enjoy speculating about the fuel control unit that went missing after it was gathered as evidence. The NTSB says the part played no role in the accident and that both engines were operating at full power during the accident. However, Carson is saying the crash was caused when one engine experienced a loss of power caused by the part that later disappeared. If Carson can successfully deflect blame to the company that manufactured the part, or at least establish some doubt about the accident’s cause, it may reduce their financial liability.
Who regulates wildfire aviation?
The answer is: nobody. The FAA claims they have no authority to regulate the aviation activities of other federal agencies or state and local governments. This authority has to be granted by Congress, which has shown no interest in becoming involved in the aviation safety of firefighters. And the federal agencies, or at least the U.S. Forest Service as proven in this accident, generally do not have the aviation expertise to inspect and regulate their own agency-owned or contracted aircraft. Good luck in trying to not think about this the next time you’re climbing into a helicopter at a fire. (Let’s see – got hard hat, gloves, line gear, tool, life insurance.)
If you use the BEHAVE fire behavior prediction and fuel modeling system for wildland fire, you should download and install the latest version, 5.0.3 for Windows. It was released on November 22, 2010 and includes several bug fixes, as well as these changes from V. 4.0.
Additional models have been added to the CROWN module. The previous values are on the ‘Spread Outputs’ tab. The new output variables are on the ‘Intensity Outputs’ tab. A new flow diagram is in the help window. New variables include crown fireline intensity and flame length, power of the fire and of the wind, and wind-driven or plume-dominated fire.
The tree mortality models have been updated in the MORTALITY module to match those in FOFEM. Ten new mortality equations are available. In some cases the results are very different from the old equations. The help system gives the equations and a table of the inputs used for each. The option of directly entering bark thickness was removed because the new equations don’t use that variable. The ‘Mortality equation’ variable added in version 4 was removed. The flow diagram was removed from the help system because it is not applicable to the new equations.December 6, 2010
Changes were made to several overstory variables. This fixes a fatal crash situation in version 4.0. The change resolves potential inconsistencies in the relationship among ‘Canopy Height’, ‘Canopy Base Height’, and ‘Crown Ratio’. The variable ‘Tree Height’ was changed to ‘Torching Tree Height’ and is used only in SPOT to calculate spotting distance from torching trees. ‘Canopy Height’ is now used as input to MORTALITY rather than ‘Tree Height’.
A new variable, ‘Downwind Canopy Height’, was added to the SPOT module and is used in the calculation of spotting distance. This value can different from ‘Canopy Height’ at the site of the fire.
A new variable, ‘Live fuel load portion’, was added to the SURFACE Fuels Outputs tab.
Many other changes can be found in the Change Log. The BEHAVE program can be download HERE.
Important Installation Instructions:
If you have already installed a previous version of BehavePlus 5.0 on your computer, uninstall it before installing the latest version on your computer. BehavePlus 5.0 automatically installs in a different directory than versions 4, 3, 2 or 1; it is not necessary to uninstall earlier versions before installing Version 5.
We have a report that Tanker 44, the air tanker that ran off the end of the runway at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport (JeffCo) in Colorado on July 26, 2010, is back in the air. Apparently repairs were made and Neptune Aviation has been conducting flight tests yesterday and today in Colorado.
Tanker 44 off the runway, July 6, 2010. Photo: Cliff Grassmick
The P2V-5 Neptune operated by Neptune Aviation out of Missoula, MT, experienced a hydraulic failure upon landing, had no brakes, and went off the end of the runway (map). Both pilots self-evacuated and were walking around when fire apparatus arrived to put out a fire in one of the engines.
The air tanker had been supporting the Cow Creek fire in Rocky Mountain National Park when the accident occurred.
