BRISTOL, Va. – A Virginia State Police helicopter was 300 feet above the earth Tuesday when, as the pilot described it, the worst possible thing that can happen in a helicopter happened. They heard a loud pop, then the engine stopped running.
Five seconds later they smashed into a field, but, remarkably, upright. Neither trooper inside was injured.
Trooper Ron Addison estimated they spent just one of those five seconds “wide eyed.” In the other four, pilot Sgt. John Ratliff managed to tilt the nose up, a maneuver they call autorotation, so that air keeps the propeller spinning like a pinwheel. It is not easy, Ratliff said.
They barely missed the treetops as they dropped, at a slight angle, at 2,000 feet per minute. The Bell 407 helicopter hit the ground “pretty hard” – hard enough to bounce once before skidding to a stop about 2:40 p.m. They landed in a rolling field, circled with trees, about a mile deep into a farm off Black Hollow Road, just outside of Bristol, Va.
“I’m just glad to be alive,” Ratliff said. “It could have been a much worse outcome.”
At first they thought they would flip over, but the helicopter’s metal landing skids spread, absorbing the impact. The troopers jumped out as they stopped, in fear of an explosion. Both walked away uninjured.
Ratliff estimated upwards of $100,000 in damage to the helicopter, which is used for medical rescues and police missions. He said they won’t know what caused the engine failure until they take it apart, but guessed by the sound it made that a bad bearing had something to do with it. The State Police, along with the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board, is investigating the incident.
It was Addison’s second day back with the Virginia State Police after a year in Iraq with the National Guard. Ratliff was training Addison, a “refresher,” he called it.
“He made it home from Iraq, then we try to kill him in the mountains of Abingdon,” Ratliff said, laughing as the two stood at the crash site hours later. “It went from training to a really real-life thing.”
They took off from Virginia Highlands Airport, the Virginia State Police Aviation Base, and were planning to land on the Bristol farm, three miles away, chosen for it’s landing difficulty and seclusion. Addison was flying at about 80 knots, circling the field 250 feet above the treetops when the engine failed. Ratliff took over and Addison manned the controls and gauges.
“A helicopter without an engine will fall pretty much like a rock,” Addison said, explaining how difficult it is to land a helicopter safely with a spent engine. “It happened so fast, we didn’t have much time to be scared.”
It is so dangerous, Ratliff said, that the helicopter’s manufacturer, Bell, sends a test pilot up from Texas twice a year to train Virginia State Police pilots for the unlikely event of engine failure. They fly up, cut off the motor and land without it.
“That training just kicked in when I realized we lost the engine,” Ratliff said. “It was an experience. And I guess we got lucky.”
cgalofaro@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2531
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