Could be a rough Christmas for the turks
Fierce tragedy off the west coast yesterday, very unusual circumstances surrounding the disappearance of R116, no mayday, no distress signal from the helicopter when it hit the water and no personal locating signal from any of the crew on board.
Lads here won’t care, mate… there’s horses being whipped around fields …
I am awaiting the Aviation/Nautical expert view from Fingal. I must admit, its been very muted so far leading me to wonder what they may know and won’t say.
It’s nuts. No mayday call or report of any mechanical failure on a night when the weather wasn’t hazardous enough to expect this kind of thing.
Any chance the Russkies were sending spy planes through our air space and there was an accidental collision?
Blame the ruskies
A similar thought crossed my mind. While the weather conditions were not great, it should not go down without a signal unless it was destroyed in the air.
Is there a potential, given the fact there was no warning etc, that it was serious pilot error?
Probably not nice to be speculating as such, but might explain why there was no warning issued.
They do a hell of a job. The Shannon based one passes right over my house every weekend when they go on calls/training exercises.
Spatial disorientation is a thing but with the technology on board that chopper you’d say she would be lit up like a Christmas tree with warnings of such an issue.
Still wouldn’t explain why the epirb signals were not activated when they hit the water. These things are designed to float away from the craft when it’s submerged sending signals pin pointing their positions via satellite. Each crew member had a individual one of these in their suit also. No signal from any of them is weird unless there was an explosive collision with something
Surely they would have got a mayday call away though?
Jaysus. I wasn’t aware of that.
The guy on the radio yesterday morning said they flew 10 miles past Blacksod and then turned to make their approach to land as was normal procedure. Last contact was 6 miles out.
I didn’t think a helicopter would need to make such wide arcs to land?
If the Russians are flying spy planes at 5000 feet 8 miles from our west coast we’re all in trouble
May it was higher and had a malfunction, collided on the way to Earth?
Hardly any chance of a bird colliding with it and making a balls of the rotors?
Something to do with wind direction I think, also despite what most people think those machines are subject to flight paths also and may have been following a defined flight path into the landing zone.
Maybe there were hit with a meteorite…
Has the theory of “something untoward” yet been advanced?