Pilots Can’t Stop Cockpit Video Forever

It was after 11 p.m. on March 30, 2013, when the Alaska Department of Public Safety helicopter lifted off near Talkeetna, north of Anchorage, after rescuing a stranded snowmobiler. Freezing rain was changing to heavier snow, and visibility was decreasing. Within minutes the chopper had crashed, killing its pilot, a state trooper, and the person they’d been sent to rescue.

Usually, investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board have to guess what went wrong in such situations. But when they examined the chopper’s charred wreckage, they found a treasure in the ashes: a cockpit video recorder. The footage, from a camera mounted on the ceiling behind pilot Mel Nading, ruled out mechanical problems or ice as factors in the crash. Rather, investigators could see that Nading was confused. He allowed the helicopter to slow and start rocking back and forth, then reached out and reset the device that should show whether the craft is flying level—a decision that sealed his fate, making it “very unlikely that he would regain control of the helicopter,” the NTSB said in its report. In the dark, without an accurate reading, Nading had no way of knowing which way was up. “It really gave us the insight that this pilot was spatially disoriented,” says John DeLisi, the NTSB’s chief aviation investigator. “Without that video, we would have been looking at a pile of burned-up wreckage, trying to figure out what caused the erratic flight path that led to this crash.”