How a sight-seeing helicopter tour ended in tragedy after crashing into mountain
The bright Nordic summer was drawing to a close when a tragedy hit in the mountains of northern Norway.
One of country’s worst helicopter accidents struck on August 31, 2019, when an Airbus AS350 chopper crashed in the Skoddevarre mountains in Alta, Finnmark county, in a remote part of Lapland.
It killed all on board – five passengers on a heli tour and a pilot – when the helicopter’s rotors locked up mid-air, causing it to dive into the mountainside and set on fire.
But how could a helicopter which had been safety checked just hours before suddenly plunge?
Grim ending to a music festival
The chopper crash cast a shadow over the annual Høstsprell festival whose guests were on the doomed helicopter sightseeing tour over majestic Alta.
After a safety inspection at lunchtime, the chopper took of with a first group of tourists, followed by another one shortly before 5pm by the same pilot.
The weather conditions were said to be clear.
The tourists sent Snapchats to friends just as the chopper approached the Skoddevarre mountains – when it suddenly disappeared from flight radars, with its last coordinates recorded in Flightradar24 website at 5.08pm.
No one witnessed the crash itself, but a bystander alerted the airfield loadmaster after spotting plumes of smoke. When the helicopter’s emergency position radiobeacon went off, the emergency services were alerted.
Miraculously, the rescue teams saw a survivor around 164 feet from the destroyed aircraft. He was conscious and able to speak, but unable to say how the crash happened, according to the Norwegian Safety Investigation Authority report.
The survivor was flown to the hospital where he died overnight. Four other victims were declared dead at the scene of the crash, and one missing victim was found dead hours later.
The mountainside had turned into a deadly inferno after the crash – the entire frame of the chopper was destroyed, including all electronic devices, and ground around it burst in flames.
What caused the crash?
The tragedy triggered an investigation, including a team from the manufacturer Airbus.
The efforts were hampered by the severe damage to the flight recorder, so investigators tried to piece together other evidence.
A Snapchat video clip taken half a minute before the crash was analysed, but it did give any clues about the cause of the crash, Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported.
Finally in 2022, the aviation safety authorities published their report, saying the most likely cause was a phenomenon known as servo transparency.
It means when the stress on the rotor exceeds the capacity of the hydraulic servomotor, the flight controls stiffen and become harder to handle.
High speeds, mass and altitude can play a role in the fatal phenomena, and there have been 11 previous accidents relating to it, the NSIA said.
Helicopter crashes in Norway
Norway, one of world’s top oil producers, is no stranger to helicopter tragedies.
In 2016, commercial flights using Airbus Super Puma aircraft were grounded after 13 people – including one Briton – were killed in a crashed into the sea.
It was travelling from an oil platform in the North Sea when it crashed, killing all on board.
In another incident this year, one person died and five others were injured when a Sikorsky S-92 helicopter came down into the North Sea near Bergen.
The crash site suggested that the pilot had almost managed to regain control, but he ran out of height, crashing into the mountainside.
The authorities said that the relatively low impact suggested that the victims would have had a good chance of survival if the wreck would not have caught on fire.
Airbus made crash-resistant fuel systems part of every new AS350 after the crash, and strongly advised operators to retrofit old choppers with it. The crashed chopper had not been retrofitted as doing so would have cost €35,000, according to local Alta Posten.
The safety authorities said the victims could have ‘probably survived’ if the fire didn’t break out immediately.
All the passengers were young adults from the local Alta area aged between 19 and 22.
In the aftermath, political parties in the region agreed to hold off from campaigning ahead of the upcoming local elections to mourn the tragedy until the victims’ funerals were held, the Finnmark Dagblad reported.
The music festival cancelled all of its events, but festivalgoers were allowed to gather at the site to remember the victims.
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