Taipan helicopter crash – what we know so far

What we know so far isn’t much in addition to the official information that on Friday evening a Taipan crashed into the sea near Hamilton Island, killing the crew of four.  It didn’t ditch – a ditching is close to a controlled event – and the impact was so severe that there was little possibility of anyone surviving and the helicopter was damaged beyond recovery.

In the past APDR has reported on a number of maintenance processes concerning Taipan and so it is worth pointing out that it is unlikely that these were the cause of the accident, though it is too early to rule things definitively in or out.  The official position of Defence is not to speculate – and that’s fine as no one on the inside wants to pre-empt the official investigation that started almost immediately.

However, when something like this occurs, people are anxious and worried, wanting answers and explanations.  It’s the same whenever there is loss of life in a house fire, a car accident, a train derailment, or an aircraft crash – authorities usually like to give some early indications of the cause of the tragedy so that it is not seen as a random act of nature.

There are several things that can be said in a broad sense – and the first is that military night flying exercises, particularly at low level – are inherently risky affairs and push the abilities of crews and their machines to the limit.  They are a necessary evil because the point of activities such as Talisman Sabre is to prepare for war – and that is done only by going through demanding and realistic scenarios.

Unfortunately, even with the best of planning and the most thorough preparation things occasionally go wrong.  On June 12, 1996, two Army Black Hawk helicopters collided and crashed near Townsville during a night training exercise killing 18 soldiers.  Fixed wing platforms are not immune and on April 18, 1999, a RAAF F-111G fast jet flew into a mountain while on a training exercise in Malaysia killing the crew of two.

While night vision systems are improving, they are still far from perfect.  One’s field of view is limited; the image is in a single colour – typically shades of green – and accurate distance perception is very difficult.  If you combine that with the high intensity requirements of a military exercise with multiple simultaneous radio conversations and enemy activity being simulated, people are being deliberately highly stressed.

Other reasons why the Taipan could have crashed include mechanical failure.  The aircraft did not look as if the emergency floatation system had been activated, so it might have been flying fast and low with almost no warning time before hitting the water.  If a rotor blade had been affected or something in the structure had broken it might have been a cause.  However, these helicopters are robust machines designed to operate in high intensity conflict with extremely tough construction requirements and multiple redundant electrical and hydraulic systems.

Some type of software failure is also possible – as the world saw with Boeing’s disastrous MCAS on the initial 737MAX family of commercial aircraft that caused two of the jets to crash, with hundreds of people killed.  In these cases, the flight control software caused the nose of the aircraft to repeatedly pitch down to fix a non-existent problem.  Could this have happened on the Taipan?  Theoretically yes, because they use similar computer-controlled fly-by-wire systems, but this family of helicopters have been flying for two decades with nothing this serious yet discovered.

There have been accidents when helicopters have lost aerodynamic lift at low altitude and subsequently crashed – for example in July 2020 a Dutch NH90 crashed while practicing a deck landing, killing two crew.  However, these sorts of events can occur with all helicopters and, generally speaking, the Taipan family has a good safety record with more than 500 in service with 14 countries.

The Australian investigation is likely to take many months and will start with the pieces of the helicopter being reassembled to examine structural issues.  All voice recordings and radio traffic will be analysed to come up with the clearest possible picture of the minutes before the crash.  The mission the helicopter was performing at the time of the crash will be analysed in detail.

Hopefully those finding will eventually be made public so everyone can make sense of this tragedy.

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