Its not a Tesla sighting. But I saw our flyer Tesla owner papafox on tv again tonight talking about the helo crash as Pearl Harbor.
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Sheesh, on a day I'm counting Teslas on the island, Akikiki is counting Papafox sightings. There's some irony in there somewhere.
I didn't see the newscast. Was it determined if the chopper was settling with power or is this still unknown?
The helicopter touched down with enough sink rate to give some of the occupants back problems, and so it strongly looks as if the engine was not producing power. Normally, a helicopter pilot can keep the rotor speed up if he keeps his forward speed until just before the landing flare (when there is no engine power), but it looked like the rotor speed dissipated while the helicopter was still pretty high, causing a hard touchdown. In this case, having water underneath was likely a blessing.
I'm hearing through the grapevine that the helicopter might have experienced a failure of the linkage to the tail rotor. That would explain the lack of power because if power was applied to the main rotor and the tail rotor was not turning, the helicopter would spin around. The engine likely was running but power couldn't be applied because of the tail rotor situation. If this was the case, it was quite a bit more serious situation than a simple engine failure. I also heard that the pilot may have been heading for a place on land but people came out to stand on that point and he had to change his landing spot to the water. It's all grapevine rumblings and I don't know for sure what happened, but it's food for thought.
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