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By Jacob K Philip

A chain of unusual and erroneous actions taken by the pilots caused the crash of a helicopter last year in India that was carrying M. A. Yousuf Ali, the chairman of UAE-headquartered multinational company Lulu Group, says the report of an investigation ordered by the DGCA, India’s aviation regulator.

Unlike the media widely reported that time, the three year old Agusta Westland AW109SP helicopter was not making an emergency landing but was actually falling into a swamp at Panangadu, near Kochi, in the south Indian state of Kerala, as per the investigation report.

The incident occurred on April 11, 2021 a few minutes before 9am at Panangadu. The copter, that had taken-off from a helipad at ‘Y Mansion”, the residence of Yousuf Ali, was heading to land on the roof-top helipad of ‘Lakeshore’, a private hospital. The aerial distance to the hospital from Yousuf Ali’s residence was just 3.7km and the total flying time was estimated to be 5 minutes. While the copter was in the approach stage to land on the Lakeshore helipad, it fell into the open swamp from a height of about 300ft. Upon falling, the helicopter partially sunk into the soft mud, with dirt water entering the cockpit by up to 2 feet. Engines were shut down and all the occupants vacated the helicopter by standard exit and were transported to nearby hospital. There was no injury to any of the occupants on board, and there was no post incident smoke or fire.

Though the pilots later said they had made a forced landing due to loss of engine power after experiencing a sudden drop in altitude, the DGCA report says there were nothing wrong with any of the systems of the helicopter including the engine. Also, the pilots had made no landing – forced or otherwise.

It was a series of actions by the pilots right from the taking off of the machine, that culminated in the crash that April morning, concludes the report.

To start with, when the helicopter took of from the ‘Y Mansion’,  at Chilavannoor, Kochi, the pilots activated ‘Engine torque limiter function’ of the copter. This function limits the torque (power) produced by the engine to 220 % instead of its maximum capability of 324%. Why this limit was set is not clear.

Secondly, when it was time for the copter to take a left turn to align with the roof-top helipad of the Lakeshore hospital, the pilot increased the pitch of the craft (raised the nose) to an unusual high value of about 15 degrees. Though with the nose up, the engines needed more power to maintain the speed, that was never given. As a result the speed was reduced to 40 kts from 80kts and the copter began to descend rapidly. Three seconds after the pitch was increased to 15, it again was raised to 21 degrees, again unusually, by the pilot. As a result the the fall became quicker at 2000ft/minute and the horizontal speed became almost zero. On realizing the craft was falling, the pilots tried to increase the engine power, so as to climb up. But because of the ‘Engine torque limiter function’ they had earlier switched on, the fuel supply to the engine got reduced after the power reached the 220%. Less fuel means less power and the pilots could not climb up from the 300ft altitude there found themselves in and the helicopter fell to the ground within seconds.

The report explains that, because of the actions of setting a limit to the engine power and then increasing the pitch attitude, the helicopter also had entered into a non-recoverable stage called ‘Vortex Ring State (VRS).’ With VRS setting in, the lift produced by the rotor is massively reduced and the rate of descent of the helicopter is increased accordingly. By pulling on the collective, the effect is amplified. The VRS can be ended only by switching to autorotation or by taking up horizontal speed. But at Panangad that morning, the speed was actually getting reduced to half of the normal speed, seconds before the crash.

The DGCA report concludes that the erroneous actions taken by the pilots resulted in the crash was also because of the loss of situational awareness and not sticking to the standard operational procedures.

While examining the cockpit voice recorder, the investigators found that the voices in the cockpit were overlapped by the conversations among the passengers in the cabin. It was because the cockpit was not isolated from the cabin, even during the critical stages of the flight. The reason why the pilots lost the situational awareness can be these distractions from the cabin. Though the well experienced pilots were familiar with the short route, they failed to realise for some seconds that the copter was flying too low. Also, the first Officer (who was acting as the ‘pilot monitoring’) failed to monitor flight parameters during the critical phase of flight. It was only when the copter reached the altitude as low as 300ft, that pilot in command realised the gravity of the situation. Though he immediately increased the power to go up, because their own previous action of switching the ‘Engine torque limiter function’ on, the power refused to go up after it reached 220% and the fuel supply to the engine too got reduced. The rotor speed was dropped because of this and even the the automated warning ‘ROTOR LOW’ was sounded. By then the copter had got entangled in the irrecoverable Vortex Ring State and there was nothing that could have done but to braze for the crash.
And the helicopter at that moment happened to be above a marshy land was just providential. Otherwise the crash would have been real disastrous.
The investigators also have pointed out that the pilots in this flight (and in their previous flights too) were carrying out cockpit checks communicating with ‘gestures’. Because the procedure of ‘challenge and response’ was not carried out as per the SOP, the chances are high that crucial parameters of the flight was overlooked.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark

If there comes a point when people will decide not to fly, the issue may well be less to do with any moral or ethical issue with climate change than the fact that commercial flights have become atrocious. They are naked money-making concerns with diminishing returns on quality. The key factor that plays out here is what economists like to term inelastic demand. Prices can be raised; service quality can be reduced, but customers will keep coming. The demand remains, even if the supply leaves much to be desired.

The phenomenon is distinct over the long-haul carriers, which have, at least until recently, been spared the stripping phenomenon. Singapore Airlines, which prides itself for an almost aristocratic bearing towards its customers, proved skimp its Melbourne to Singapore leg. An insulting sampling of “toasties” was offered as a starter, a culinary outrage that did not go unnoticed. Indian passengers who had selected special meals in advance were on the money; pungent curries and dhal filled the cabin as this ridiculous excuse of a meal was handed out to customers. A few desperate, and disgusted punters asked the flight attendants if there were spare vegetarian options.

Budget airlines may have something to explain in this regard. The revolution of the cheap fare came with the reduction of expectations. No frills travel came with a certain contempt on the part of the service providers: food and drink would no longer be gratis; seat allocations would have to be purchased in advance and check-in or carry-on luggage would have to be paid for. A turning point was Dublin-based Ryanair’s attempt to go easy on toilet numbers – one per aircraft – and charge customers for their use. As the company’s penny-pinching CEO Michael O’Leary said at the time, “We rarely use all three toilets on board our aircraft anyway.” Bladders be damned.

Instead of aspiring to a higher level of service, the traditionalists have voted to go down a notch or three. What budget airlines do badly, we can do worse. The law of diminishing returns is pushing all air travel carriers downwards in what has been seen to be an exercise of “calculated misery”. The experience is appalling and unpleasant, but need not necessarily be intolerable. The result is a curious revision of the term “upgrade”. As Alex Abad-Santos laments in Vox, passengers upgrade their seats, not to get a more spectacular service or experience, but “to avoid hell.”

Managing such misery is hardly original, though Tim Wu of Columbia Law School can be credited for giving a good overview of it when writing in 2014 for The New Yorker. “Here’s the thing: in order for fees to work, there needs to be something worth paying to avoid. That necessitates, at some level, a strategy that can be described as ‘calculated misery’. Basic service, without fees, must be sufficiently degraded in order to make people want to pay to escape it. And that’s where the suffering begins.”

Nothing says such suffering than crammed economy seats on a long-haul flight. Shoulders and arms are jammed; legs can barely move. The trend was such that Bill McGee, a writer with more than a passing acquaintance with the airline industry, would note, referring to the United States, that the most spacious economy seats “you can book on the nation’s four largest airlines are narrower than the tightest economy seats offered in the 1990s.”

Things are not much better in terms of the European market. Mediocrity mixes with indifference, even on flights which are half-full. A flight from London Heathrow to Copenhagen with Scandinavian Airlines was characterised by a certain snooty indifference on the part of the flight attendants. Much babbling was taking place in Finnish – why would you want to assist passengers? Little by way of interest in the customers was afforded. Curt instructions were issued; requests for coffee were received with glacial stares. Naturally, to receive a meal and drink that wasn’t water that had seen better days required forking out of the plastic fantastic. Gone are the days when international airlines behaved as such, wishing to make matters decent, comfortable and even pleasantly bearable; the European air space finds itself populated by the stingy and the tight-belted.

Commercial airlines from SAS to Singapore Airlines have taken whole sheafs of extortion from the budget airline book of making customers pay for selecting seats. The stress here is budget service at caviar prices. This cheeky form of thieving imposes a cost on the act of jumping the queue for a better place on the flight. And this is not all. You book a ticket with a flight, only to find at the airport that you had purchased a “light” version, meaning that you have to pay for carryon luggage.

High time for a customer revolt, but the industry is distinctly programmed. Even when airlines have been well disposed to their customers, such as JetBlue, the corporate monsters of Wall Street have howled. It’s bad form to provide decent service within reasonable expectations. Efficiency, and filling the seats, is what matters, whatever the quality. Fee-free services, being conscious of the brand and a “customer-focussed” approach was simply not on. Eventually, JetBlue caved in and joined the market of calculated misery.

 Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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