Thanks for watching, check out me other bits! My new Album: madebyjohn.bandcamp.com/album/ambient-archiv-1 Outro Song: th-cam.com/video/RbpmJJXqSPg/w-d-xo.htmlsi=2_i6bKZUj3bjixzw Instagram: instagram.com/plainly.john/ Patreon: www.patreon.com/Plainlydifficult Merch: plainly-difficult.creator-spring.com Twitter:twitter.com/Plainly_D
What happened to the passengers on the helicopter? It might be a stupid question, and the answer might be obvious, but I'd like to know for sure. I just never heard about them afterward.
Hope you don't mind a bit of constructive criticism, but the background music is too loud and distracting. Sadly it's the first video of yours that I can't enjoy listening to. I've listened to you since the beginning and never noticed music on your videos before. I just enjoyed listening to your voice and calm explanations and great story telling.
Thank you so much! You've kept my nerves calm and mind thinking. Which is huge these days 😢 ...so glad I heard more of your music. I love it . I'll have to save some money for one. A relax , relax one. Would be great for when reading. Ty for the feet. 😊. And keep that pace easy 😊😊😊 your awesome 💯
The crane operator was meant to have been working at the time of the collision, but had overslept for the first time in 3 years. He arrived at site just as the helicopter collided with the jib.
If he had been at work on time the crane jib wouldn’t have been parked in the up position so likely no one would have died this fateful day. Sadly a chain of event is usually behind these types of accidents, not just a single thing.
@@KiwiCatherineJemma A REMINDER! YOUR LUCK CAN RUN OUT! I suggest buying lottery tickets on your lowest point, worst possible luck EVER, because your luck will be bouncing back from the low.
Not safe to have the lights on whilst it is in operation, but there should have been a rule of having them on and the crane not operating once visibility was below a certain level. That said, it would be safe to operate it with lower visibility than it was safe to be flying a helicopter around with warning lights on buildings. So you're effectively stopping the construction company from working for the benefit of helicopters taking risk that they shouldn't have been taking.
In aviation, Completion Bias is colloquially known as "get-there-itis". But it's more specifically about powering on to your destination. It leads to a lot of bad decisions that result in crashes. A lot of VFR into IMC. Flying under visual flight rules into instrument meteorological conditions. After that, a number of things can happen. Spatial disorientation and icing being common.
Same thing that killed Kobe and Gianna Bryant (and 6 others)... helicopter crash in fog due to a pilot's Get-There-Itis... only into a mountain instead of a crane.
@@lairdcummings9092 I think his case was more of his being a relatively inexperienced pilot, taking on a situation that he wasn't fully trained to handle but thought he could anyway, with Get-There-Itis as a contributing factor.
I went to school with the pilots daughter. I remember been satdown in the 'mess' (dinning room) having lunch all laughing and joking as 11yr kids do. Out of nowhere, our housemaster walks up to our table, grabs her lunch tray, and tells her that she needs to come with him. I'll never forget that moment. It couldn't have happened to a nicer and kinder family. R.I.P Pete Barnes -
@katiekane5247 If I was to make a guess, it was out of fear of her finding out online or something. Most of us had smartphones by that point and it was a heading story that day.
I used to work full time with the Air Ambulance in London (Medical personnel, not flight crew) and I can tell you one thing for sure, it is really hard to visualise how disorienting fog or low clouds can be until you are literally flying inside of the thickest sections of it. More than once I could have sworn we were going left when we were really turning to the right. It's a terrifying place to be at a time like that. It's bad enough on the ground in a fast response vehicle in the fog, but at least you're not going to fall 500ft if it all goes pete tong.
Agreed. I still remember the first few times I did flying to instrument reference. Fixed-wing, but the principles are the same. It's creepy as hell to have your senses telling you you're doing one thing, and the instruments are saying something completely different. You really have to experience it to understand it.
Given that lights on the construction site were required to be installed by law I don’t understand the reasoning behind limited this safety feature to just night time. I am all for reducing our collective energy usage, but I think safety equipment might be the one legitimate caveat here.
@@GigsTaggart That's probably it. Daytime aircraft clearance lights are high-intensity white strobes rather than the medium-intensity slow-pulse red ones used at night; they would be absolute hell to work anywhere close to.
Given London's frequent fogs, they should have been an additional requirement for the lights to be on during _daytime_ periods of reduced visibility. I am not sure how that would be managed (automated or manual), but there surely must be a solution.
I recall years ago, needing to scud run back to our departure airport on the other side of low mountains, due to a lowering cloud deck. We chose to strictly follow a river back, knowing no rising terrain, high rises, or radio towers would be in the middle of the river. Definitely ended up braking FAA regs, but we were able to safely return home.
I am a pretty good driver I think but the one car I've totalled was in heavy fog jumping this roundabout they just added on backroads I drive a lot. Was looking for the bright red 4 way stop light but instead all I saw was dim white lights after it was already too late. They even gave me a ticket, Failure to control the traffic control device. Judge reduced the ticket as much as he could and then a few months later they changed it back to a 4 way stop. Kinda feel like the city owes me a car.
That is a rule here in Sweden. Any crane, tower or other construction above a certain height (i think 40 m) has to have warning lights on at all times.
@@dannnmerkle7930 You failed to adjust your speed to the conditions - in plain speech you drove where you couldn't see. It would have been the same if there was a deer in place of the roundabout. Or it could've been a neighbor.
There is so much more to this story and I would recommend that anyone who is interested read the AAIB report. What seems to be missing here is that Pete Barnes was flying an autopilot equipped twin over London in IFR conditions which is just fine. He was communicating with ATC and asking if Battersea was open yet and they held him so he was orbiting near the tower on autopilot. When ATC told him that Battersea had opened he changed the setting bug on his autopilot to direct Battersea which as history recalls took his path directly through the jib of the crane. If the call or his reaction were 30 seconds later then perhaps no tragedy for all involved acknowledging the post below about his young daughter.
@@Failure_Is_An_Option If you want to talk numbers I'm not gonna stop you. Although I doubt that there is a significant amount of data regarding flying cars, as they never really left the concept stage and there are only a handful of prototypes. I know that accidents like the one in the video are rare, but this is also due to the fact that the amount of helicopters flying in cities is quite low. Now imagine what could happen on a foggy day if not one, but one hundred or one thousand helicopters (or flying cars for that matter) would fly over a city. In this video, the building that was hit was under construction, but imagine this was an office building or a apartment building. That would be much worse.
@@Failure_Is_An_Option according to the IATA there were 5 fatal airliner accidents with loss of crew or passengers in 2022 over 32 million flights giving an average of 0.16 crashes per million. Assuming regular civilians can live up to the standards of our airliners, just in the US with 50 million cars (out of the 290 mil on the road) doing 2 trips a day = 100 million trips you would have 16 fatal flying cars crashing a day. All accident rates are 1.21 per million flights or 121 flying car crashes a day
You might be interested in the Dallas crane collapse. They didn’t let it rotate in high wind and it came down and smashed a huge apartment building. I was a few blocks away at the time and vividly remember the huge storm and explosion sound
Nowhere near the same situation but this tangentially reminded me of that f18 that crashed into the housing area in Virginia Beach back in 2012. No casualties with that one, thank goodness. I live in an area with a high amount of commercial and military aircraft so seeing something like this makes me realize how amazing it is that things like this don’t happen more often and how devastating it can be when it does.
I lived in VB at the time, that crash was absolutely bonkers. Nobody was home at the time which in and of itself is insane. But on top of that, both Pilots were able to eject safely, and also landed near the plane in the same Elderly Community. The old folks there had helped make sure they were doing okay before first responders arrived. Lived in the Hampton Roads area for over 20 years, and that was the first time something like that had happened. Which given how low they fly out of NAS Ocean, I'm very surprised. I used to live a mile from the base and you could WAVE to the Pilots sometimes as they flew by. Noise so loud your windows vibrate and shit falls off shelves.
@@betrun73 Not to mention all the flights from Langley AFB, training at Eustis and CG TRACEN Yorktown, plus two commercial airports in close proximity…yeah, we’re definitely lucky.
air travel is the safest form of transportation because of the potential for very, very tragic results in the case of things going wrong. over the course of its development, the air industry has gone to great pains to continually improve its operation at every level, from the design and makeup of the planes themselves, to the quality of pilot training, to the procedures in place that guide flights safely through the skies. regulations are written in blood, sadly, but the silver lining is the fact that we are, for the most part, always striving to never repeat a disaster again. the primary thing standing in the way of the best practices is money and greed. that's a problem we may never be able to solve, unfortunately, so the best we can hope for is that every other measure put in place to safeguard flights will act as a safety net to prevent greed from taking down more flights. but this is why, in spite of the sheer volume of flights taking place in high traffic areas, we don't see these types of incidents frequently, if at all. of course, it makes every tragedy cut ever deeper, but we can perhaps find solace in the knowledge that the experts will do all in their power to make sure it never happens again.
You should do the 787 7th Avenue Helicopter incident, which happened in NYC on June 10, 2019. The pilot is believed to have crashed his helicopter into the roof of a skyscraper in order to avoid a worse accident on the ground. However- questions persist, like why was the pilot flying in such weather, or how did he manage to end up in restricted airspace? That incident is also being used to make the case for banning or at least much more heavily restricting non essential helicopter traffic over Manhattan.
My Dad worked in that area at the time, albeit not in the construction industry. As soon as I heard the news of what happened that day, I called him on his mobile to make sure he wasn't affected. Needless to say, when he answered his phone and wasn't in the area of the crash when it happened, I breathed a big sigh of relief
I remember this and the conversations afterwards about minimum flying Hight requirements as well as the growing number of helicopters used for pleasure and commercial use in and around London
I do remember this quite well. Barnes had flown as eye in the sky for the Olympic Games when I worked there in 2012. He did manage to avoid the railway bridge and a train on it at the time which was at least one positive to take away from this tragic accident. Unfortunately helicopter accidents are rarely survivable from my watching of these type of videos.
It varies. Helicopter crashes are sometimes at low airspeed (energy). These can be easily survivable. That said any midair or tower collision is likely to be fatal, as the rotors are usually destroyed.
@@ricbarker4829 Oh dear is this one of those cases of you assuming I care about your views or is this because a female dared to comment on this channel? I do know far more than the average joe on this particular topic as a very close friend was less than half a mile away on that road when it happened. So jog on Ric.
@@aimeedean1 Wait I'm confused, what did their comment have anything to do with you being a woman? I mean, all they did was give their opinion that the pilot didn't "manage to avoid" something and that rather, they believe it was luck. It'd be like seeing their response and saying "are you arguing with me because I'm black?!" lol They said nothing about our gender at all..
Wow, I never heard of this one. Hindsight is truly 20\20. Those lights on the crane should have been on any time visibility was low. Can't imagine what went through the brains of those two souls.🙁🙏
I remember that day. That winter, I was doing work in Swindon with the same construction company that were leading the build of St Georges Tower.. I had a student working with me who took a call mid-morning and turned white as a sheet. It turned out the call was from one of his fellow students that was working three floors from the top of Georges tower when the helicopter struck.
It's easy even for experts to just go on mental 'autopilot' (no pun intended) when driving or flying a route you've done hundreds of times. I find myself doing it in my car during the commute, you just stop thinking about external hazards until they're right in front of you.
I definitely don’t envy any pilot that has to fly a rotorcraft solo in downtown London. Very busy airspace, lots of tall buildings and spires, plus all the normal single pilot the task loading of managing radios, navigation, other aircraft, the airspace, and of course flying the aircraft itself. As seen here, unfortunately all it can take is a few seconds of disorientation and that’s it.
One reason I love your channel is that you talk about places in or around London often enough, and in most cases I am fairly familiar with them, like those places mentioned today.
3:34 notice to airmen or NOTAM is not just a notice of things not to crash into but they can advise of abnormal flight maneuvers around airbases or inactive periods for airfields aswell as many other things.
Right now it’s a foggy day and some AHs are driving around without their headlights on. Without their headlights on they’re invisible until the seemingly appear out of nowhere. We had a car driving without their headlights on almost hit us because we couldn’t see them and made a left turn because we thought it was safe to do so.
There are 3 reasons for not having headlamps on during heavy fog. 1 ... Headlight switch is broken. 2... Driver is idiot and think's they're actually saving money on their home electric bill and 3.. Some cars have AUTO headlamps which turn on at night, but the high reflected light level of Fog during day-time, means the auto lamps may not come on. Decades ago Britain changed the law so if your windscreen wipers are on, your headlights must be on. Soon after , my uncle forgot to switch them off when he parked and ran his battery flat !
Flying a helicopter in IMC conditions is often deadly. Kobe Bryant found that out. It's up to the pilot to make that risk assessment for marginal conditions.
This is why the idea of flying cars (inspired by drones) is stupid. These people who think flying cars are the answer to traffic congestion are the same people who would run into shit.
As long as there are lawyers there will probably NEVER be flying cars on a large scale. In the US every day we are bombarded with " Have you been in a accident? CALL 1800 SUE type commercials. Can you imagine the lawsuits?
The concept feels similar to 3d chess, as someone who's never played it. You're just adding more dimensions and layers, not actually solving anything. It overcomplicates things, and roads/flying paths would still be necessary so
I remember working at St Thomas' Hospital and you could see the Vauxhall tower in the distance. A patient was reminded of the helicopter crash and was keen to talk about it.
Well done John, you found one that we knew very little about again. Last few have been done to death many times, Last one even Mentor Pilot did and did well. Very few chopper crashes I have seen. Not that I really went out of my way looking for them, just know not found their way down my feed. This comment comes from a very sold slightly misty part of Oxford UK
I remember this one happening and it being all over the news for about two days and then it just seemed to disappear from the collective consciousness and I have never heard anything since. I was kind of excited to find out more about it and the results of the investigation. Really appreciate it 😁 This comment comes from a clear dry and chilly day in a part of Oxford, UK! (Hey fellow Oxfordian!)
The best caption in news history may be on footage of a crane operator in Nashville who was trapped in their highrise crane cab during a storm that unleashed a tornado through Nashville. It reads, "Editor's note: This video includes the kind of graphic language that many adults would use if they were stuck in a crane with a tornado approaching." We had a bunch more today. Spent some time in the basement with a bunch of friends who came over this evening.
As much as I want to make a quip about James Bond since this took place near the MI-6 building, I’ll behave myself out of respect for the victims and their families as well as Mister John who’s gracious enough to research and share these stories with us to begin with.
Just before watching this I watched a documentary about a woman who allegedly killed some people...with mushrooms. Boy I love when videos are unconnectedly connected!
My mum used to work with Matt (the casualty) in a T Shirt factory in Morden. He got to work early that day. He was a nice man apparently. Remembered everyone’s birthday at work. Don’t see that often.
I didn't know the word for it, but I recently experienced 'completion bias' for myself in a rather visceral way. (Everything turned out fine, but still.) Knowing it's a documented phenomenon just made a few things snap into place in my head. So thanks! :)
I remember seeing this on the TV News at the time... Hard to believe such a crash could happen in London, fog or no fog. Much like the Glasgow Clutha helecopter crash into a pub. Hindsight is a marvellous thing but after such accidents, surely clear lighting which signifies the presence of the height of construction cranes etc ought to be made visible as par for the course let alone flights which should be routed far from such congested areas...😳😢
Excellent video! Helicopters are such strange designs. Just as a note, could you balance the intro music a bit in your next vids, it was /really/ loud compared to the narration.
The trumpet jingle oversaturate the output. Just use some dynamic compression ti equalise the audio level during the transition from the intro to the speech. Thank you John, for the great video. Greetings, Anthony
The other day over in New Zealand,A helicopter crashed onto a building killing the pilot who was NOT authorized to fly at the time.He did not get permission to take the helicopter out which resulted in him flying onto the roof of a building in Auckland killing him and injuring a few others I believe.
Current story in Sydney Australia worth checking out is the Rozelle Interchange - a disaster of planning for a very expensive tunnell system gone wrong on many fronts. currently the talk of the town or shall I say ire of Sydeysiders.
what always got me about was the poor guy on the ground, probaly going to work, with all the normal worries , then out of nowhere , one of the most unlikely incidents to occur , being killed by a falling helicopter
@@PlainlyDifficult Hey John, what's with the choice to put a 90s-chillout style track with this story? Haven't checked your album but I dunno if it's all like this Doesn't really fit IMO, hearing about people getting killed and injured in the disaster segment to lift-style music was a bit of a tonal clash. Normally it feels a bit less upbeat and more respectful? Dunno, I'll check out your album and see if there are other moods to it
I remember listening to this on LBC on the morning it happened, aside the crew onboard ; was always astonished that only one person died on the ground, could have been a lot worse.
I know right!?! They should've learned from this to have the crane's hazard lights on all the time like in many countries, or at least during foggy conditions!
Another excellent video!!! ❤😊🎉 Thank you!! ❤😊... So sad that the helicopter didn't make it!! 😢🙏💔💔... Just read in the comments that the crane operator overslept for the first time in years... he got there just as the helicopter crashed... 🙏💔💔.... As my mother would say... "sometimes it's just your time".... prayers to the families and all involved... 🙏💔💔😢
i feel like i can’t truly grasp the severity of situations like this bc the tallest building i’ve ever been in was like six stories. my brain just cannot process the idea of a building being 50 stories tall
Not sure how high up in a building I've ever been maximum, but certainly when I have been, about 6 stories up, it's startin' t' give me the HeeBee GeeBees feelings already. I'm a flatlander, through and through, used to ground floor, single storey living. Originally from Christchurch New ZEaland and although I lived in Perth Western Australia for a few years, but the first time I visited Sydney Australia and saw some of their tallest buildings, right in the inner city, I remember thinkin' "well I hope I'm NOT here, next time there's a decent Earthquake !"
Can you PLEASE do a video on the washington bridge closure in Rhode Island, USA. Theres a lot of pictures and stuff showing what was wrong in the inspection and why they had to emergency shut it down, but from an outside perspective with little knowledge it just looks basically like “everything rusted while we were working on it.”
I happened to be in London that day and was supposed to be meeting a friend at Vauxhall Station to go to an event at her friend’s house nearby. What a mess it was. We ended up meeting at the station just before it and walked. I remember walking past these burned cars; there was a coffeeshop either in or adjacent to Vauxhall station, and it was crammed full of police officers and other emergency workers.
Usually atc will give a pilot a height to maintain, but in saying that, the pilot should be aware of all notams in the area they are flying as well as any alternatives
I lived in St George Wharf at the time, in one of the tiny flats on the interior of the building. Got woken up by the bang, couldn't figure out what it was, and went back to sleep for a couple of hours. Got a message from my boss asking if I was OK, and I asked why he was asking, so he pointed me at the news. Was a very odd and quiet week, as the main road was shut to position the relief crane. Got hate-crimed outside the entrance to the _The Gym_ a couple of months later and left London shortly after that.
My grandfather was in the Air Force and fought in the Korean war, he always said: "Helicopters go up, and they also come right back down too!" Felt like words to live by, but then again I can't imagine helicopters back then were crazy reliable either.
Thanks for watching, check out me other bits!
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What happened to the passengers on the helicopter? It might be a stupid question, and the answer might be obvious, but I'd like to know for sure. I just never heard about them afterward.
Hope you don't mind a bit of constructive criticism, but the background music is too loud and distracting. Sadly it's the first video of yours that I can't enjoy listening to.
I've listened to you since the beginning and never noticed music on your videos before. I just enjoyed listening to your voice and calm explanations and great story telling.
Thank you so much! You've kept my nerves calm and mind thinking. Which is huge these days 😢 ...so glad I heard more of your music. I love it . I'll have to save some money for one. A relax , relax one. Would be great for when reading. Ty for the feet. 😊. And keep that pace easy 😊😊😊 your awesome 💯
The crane operator was meant to have been working at the time of the collision, but had overslept for the first time in 3 years. He arrived at site just as the helicopter collided with the jib.
He should have bought a Lottery ticket on the way home ! Clearly it was NOT the Crane Driver's day, to be issued with a cloud, Harp and Wings !
Oh my stars...
If he had been at work on time the crane jib wouldn’t have been parked in the up position so likely no one would have died this fateful day. Sadly a chain of event is usually behind these types of accidents, not just a single thing.
OMG. Really.
@@KiwiCatherineJemma A REMINDER! YOUR LUCK CAN RUN OUT! I suggest buying lottery tickets on your lowest point, worst possible luck EVER, because your luck will be bouncing back from the low.
I feel like "London Fog" (and an already tight flight path) is enough of a reason to light ANY precariously placed crane for the duration of the job
Not safe to have the lights on whilst it is in operation, but there should have been a rule of having them on and the crane not operating once visibility was below a certain level. That said, it would be safe to operate it with lower visibility than it was safe to be flying a helicopter around with warning lights on buildings. So you're effectively stopping the construction company from working for the benefit of helicopters taking risk that they shouldn't have been taking.
@@nlwilson4892 Thanks for the context
It begs the question of flying so close in an urban setting?
@@fyrman9092 Yep. Would think a higher altitude would be in order when it's all tall buildings and tower cranes.
@nlwilson4892 how is it not safe to have the lights on while operating the crane?!!
I call bullshit and plead you to substantiate that claim!
For those who don't know and want to, a figure followed by "amsl" means "above mean sea level.".
Why can't the sea level just be nice? 🥺
(JK I know it *mean*s average lol)
@@revenevan11 😄
In aviation, Completion Bias is colloquially known as "get-there-itis". But it's more specifically about powering on to your destination. It leads to a lot of bad decisions that result in crashes. A lot of VFR into IMC. Flying under visual flight rules into instrument meteorological conditions. After that, a number of things can happen. Spatial disorientation and icing being common.
Same thing that killed Kobe and Gianna Bryant (and 6 others)... helicopter crash in fog due to a pilot's Get-There-Itis... only into a mountain instead of a crane.
@@ratdude747same as killed RFK, Jr.
@@lairdcummings9092 I think his case was more of his being a relatively inexperienced pilot, taking on a situation that he wasn't fully trained to handle but thought he could anyway, with Get-There-Itis as a contributing factor.
This wasn’t get there itis, it was poor airmanship. Had he followed NOTAMs, what he did was perfectly fine. But he didn’t.
@@lairdcummings9092 I think you mean JFK, Jr.
I went to school with the pilots daughter. I remember been satdown in the 'mess' (dinning room) having lunch all laughing and joking as 11yr kids do.
Out of nowhere, our housemaster walks up to our table, grabs her lunch tray, and tells her that she needs to come with him.
I'll never forget that moment. It couldn't have happened to a nicer and kinder family.
R.I.P Pete Barnes -
That's so sad, thankfully I can't imagine.
awww :(
Crappy way to make a bad situation worse. Was it not possible to let her finish lunch and perhaps guide her gently away?
@katiekane5247 If I was to make a guess, it was out of fear of her finding out online or something. Most of us had smartphones by that point and it was a heading story that day.
How awful! That poor child.
I used to work full time with the Air Ambulance in London (Medical personnel, not flight crew) and I can tell you one thing for sure, it is really hard to visualise how disorienting fog or low clouds can be until you are literally flying inside of the thickest sections of it. More than once I could have sworn we were going left when we were really turning to the right. It's a terrifying place to be at a time like that. It's bad enough on the ground in a fast response vehicle in the fog, but at least you're not going to fall 500ft if it all goes pete tong.
Agreed. I still remember the first few times I did flying to instrument reference. Fixed-wing, but the principles are the same. It's creepy as hell to have your senses telling you you're doing one thing, and the instruments are saying something completely different. You really have to experience it to understand it.
Given that lights on the construction site were required to be installed by law I don’t understand the reasoning behind limited this safety feature to just night time. I am all for reducing our collective energy usage, but I think safety equipment might be the one legitimate caveat here.
maybe blind the operator and workers?
@@GigsTaggart That's probably it. Daytime aircraft clearance lights are high-intensity white strobes rather than the medium-intensity slow-pulse red ones used at night; they would be absolute hell to work anywhere close to.
Caveat? 🤦♂️
Exception?
Given London's frequent fogs, they should have been an additional requirement for the lights to be on during _daytime_ periods of reduced visibility. I am not sure how that would be managed (automated or manual), but there surely must be a solution.
@@pulaski1 A better solution would be to ban all but the emergency services' helicopters from flying over London in misty/foggy conditions.
I recall years ago, needing to scud run back to our departure airport on the other side of low mountains, due to a lowering cloud deck. We chose to strictly follow a river back, knowing no rising terrain, high rises, or radio towers would be in the middle of the river. Definitely ended up braking FAA regs, but we were able to safely return home.
The warning lights on the crane should have been on in fog, full intensity. That might have helped.
I agree
should have but the law states only at night with medium intensity. nothing for adverse conditions
I am a pretty good driver I think but the one car I've totalled was in heavy fog jumping this roundabout they just added on backroads I drive a lot. Was looking for the bright red 4 way stop light but instead all I saw was dim white lights after it was already too late. They even gave me a ticket, Failure to control the traffic control device. Judge reduced the ticket as much as he could and then a few months later they changed it back to a 4 way stop. Kinda feel like the city owes me a car.
That is a rule here in Sweden.
Any crane, tower or other construction above a certain height (i think 40 m) has to have warning lights on at all times.
@@dannnmerkle7930 You failed to adjust your speed to the conditions - in plain speech you drove where you couldn't see. It would have been the same if there was a deer in place of the roundabout. Or it could've been a neighbor.
There is so much more to this story and I would recommend that anyone who is interested read the AAIB report. What seems to be missing here is that Pete Barnes was flying an autopilot equipped twin over London in IFR conditions which is just fine. He was communicating with ATC and asking if Battersea was open yet and they held him so he was orbiting near the tower on autopilot. When ATC told him that Battersea had opened he changed the setting bug on his autopilot to direct Battersea which as history recalls took his path directly through the jib of the crane. If the call or his reaction were 30 seconds later then perhaps no tragedy for all involved acknowledging the post below about his young daughter.
Accidents like this are exactly the reason why I don't understand how some people think that flying cars are a good idea.
@@Failure_Is_An_Option If you want to talk numbers I'm not gonna stop you. Although I doubt that there is a significant amount of data regarding flying cars, as they never really left the concept stage and there are only a handful of prototypes.
I know that accidents like the one in the video are rare, but this is also due to the fact that the amount of helicopters flying in cities is quite low. Now imagine what could happen on a foggy day if not one, but one hundred or one thousand helicopters (or flying cars for that matter) would fly over a city. In this video, the building that was hit was under construction, but imagine this was an office building or a apartment building. That would be much worse.
They would be autopilot😊
@@MarianneKat Hopefully not Tesla's rendition of one.
@@Failure_Is_An_Option according to the IATA there were 5 fatal airliner accidents with loss of crew or passengers in 2022 over 32 million flights giving an average of 0.16 crashes per million.
Assuming regular civilians can live up to the standards of our airliners, just in the US with 50 million cars (out of the 290 mil on the road) doing 2 trips a day = 100 million trips you would have 16 fatal flying cars crashing a day.
All accident rates are 1.21 per million flights or 121 flying car crashes a day
at this point, i don’t think the majority of humans would be smart enough to figure out how to drive a flying car
You might be interested in the Dallas crane collapse. They didn’t let it rotate in high wind and it came down and smashed a huge apartment building.
I was a few blocks away at the time and vividly remember the huge storm and explosion sound
Nowhere near the same situation but this tangentially reminded me of that f18 that crashed into the housing area in Virginia Beach back in 2012. No casualties with that one, thank goodness. I live in an area with a high amount of commercial and military aircraft so seeing something like this makes me realize how amazing it is that things like this don’t happen more often and how devastating it can be when it does.
I lived in VB at the time, that crash was absolutely bonkers. Nobody was home at the time which in and of itself is insane. But on top of that, both Pilots were able to eject safely, and also landed near the plane in the same Elderly Community. The old folks there had helped make sure they were doing okay before first responders arrived.
Lived in the Hampton Roads area for over 20 years, and that was the first time something like that had happened. Which given how low they fly out of NAS Ocean, I'm very surprised. I used to live a mile from the base and you could WAVE to the Pilots sometimes as they flew by. Noise so loud your windows vibrate and shit falls off shelves.
@@betrun73 Not to mention all the flights from Langley AFB, training at Eustis and CG TRACEN Yorktown, plus two commercial airports in close proximity…yeah, we’re definitely lucky.
air travel is the safest form of transportation because of the potential for very, very tragic results in the case of things going wrong. over the course of its development, the air industry has gone to great pains to continually improve its operation at every level, from the design and makeup of the planes themselves, to the quality of pilot training, to the procedures in place that guide flights safely through the skies. regulations are written in blood, sadly, but the silver lining is the fact that we are, for the most part, always striving to never repeat a disaster again. the primary thing standing in the way of the best practices is money and greed. that's a problem we may never be able to solve, unfortunately, so the best we can hope for is that every other measure put in place to safeguard flights will act as a safety net to prevent greed from taking down more flights. but this is why, in spite of the sheer volume of flights taking place in high traffic areas, we don't see these types of incidents frequently, if at all. of course, it makes every tragedy cut ever deeper, but we can perhaps find solace in the knowledge that the experts will do all in their power to make sure it never happens again.
I don't remember any flight ops at TRACEN Yorktown. Engineering and Weapons training primarily @@TheNightmareAmpersand
Oddly this reminded me of the one that fell from the sky and landed onto a pub in Scotland. Has a video been done for that yet?
You should do the 787 7th Avenue Helicopter incident, which happened in NYC on June 10, 2019. The pilot is believed to have crashed his helicopter into the roof of a skyscraper in order to avoid a worse accident on the ground. However- questions persist, like why was the pilot flying in such weather, or how did he manage to end up in restricted airspace? That incident is also being used to make the case for banning or at least much more heavily restricting non essential helicopter traffic over Manhattan.
Fact: flying cars gonna be GREAT for this channel. Prolly bad for people, though.
Nobody mentioned flying cars but you
My Dad worked in that area at the time, albeit not in the construction industry. As soon as I heard the news of what happened that day, I called him on his mobile to make sure he wasn't affected. Needless to say, when he answered his phone and wasn't in the area of the crash when it happened, I breathed a big sigh of relief
I was on a site just around the corner. I think the crane operator had stopped for coffee before starting his shift which kept him out of harms way!
My dad also worked there and he told me to tell youtube so I'd get lots of likes
@AxionSmurf if you want to take the mick, that's fine, but it doesn't take away what I experienced
And then everyone clapped @@SiVlog1989
The visual effects in your videos are breathtaking. Watch out, Michael Bay.😆
;) holly woo here i come
I remember this and the conversations afterwards about minimum flying Hight requirements as well as the growing number of helicopters used for pleasure and commercial use in and around London
Changes frequencies, looks up, 'That's strange, why are all those pigeons SITTING in a cloud?'
Pigeons don't even hang out at that elevation.
@@Failure_Is_An_Option Just a mod of the FarSide cartoon: Humor
I do remember this quite well. Barnes had flown as eye in the sky for the Olympic Games when I worked there in 2012. He did manage to avoid the railway bridge and a train on it at the time which was at least one positive to take away from this tragic accident. Unfortunately helicopter accidents are rarely survivable from my watching of these type of videos.
It varies. Helicopter crashes are sometimes at low airspeed (energy). These can be easily survivable. That said any midair or tower collision is likely to be fatal, as the rotors are usually destroyed.
He didn't "manage to avoid" anything. It was just pure luck.
@@ricbarker4829 Oh dear is this one of those cases of you assuming I care about your views or is this because a female dared to comment on this channel? I do know far more than the average joe on this particular topic as a very close friend was less than half a mile away on that road when it happened. So jog on Ric.
@@aimeedean1 Wait I'm confused, what did their comment have anything to do with you being a woman? I mean, all they did was give their opinion that the pilot didn't "manage to avoid" something and that rather, they believe it was luck. It'd be like seeing their response and saying "are you arguing with me because I'm black?!" lol They said nothing about our gender at all..
@@LadyBeyondTheWall Why are you trying to make this about you?
Cold and wet. Boy howdy I feel you. East TN here and this is a mild, miserable winter.
Wow, I never heard of this one. Hindsight is truly 20\20. Those lights on the crane should have been on any time visibility was low. Can't imagine what went through the brains of those two souls.🙁🙏
I remember that day. That winter, I was doing work in Swindon with the same construction company that were leading the build of St Georges Tower.. I had a student working with me who took a call mid-morning and turned white as a sheet. It turned out the call was from one of his fellow students that was working three floors from the top of Georges tower when the helicopter struck.
It might have been a familiarity issue too, where the pilot felt too overconfident in an area he was used to flying in so often. Poor guy.
and pedestrian.
@@BrilliantDesignOnline And passengers...
It's easy even for experts to just go on mental 'autopilot' (no pun intended) when driving or flying a route you've done hundreds of times. I find myself doing it in my car during the commute, you just stop thinking about external hazards until they're right in front of you.
I definitely don’t envy any pilot that has to fly a rotorcraft solo in downtown London. Very busy airspace, lots of tall buildings and spires, plus all the normal single pilot the task loading of managing radios, navigation, other aircraft, the airspace, and of course flying the aircraft itself.
As seen here, unfortunately all it can take is a few seconds of disorientation and that’s it.
You got that exactly right.
The solution is to ban all but emergency helicopter flights in central London's airspace.
My train into Waterloo was delayed because of this. We could see smoke from the road area. It was too foggy to see the crane damage.
One reason I love your channel is that you talk about places in or around London often enough, and in most cases I am fairly familiar with them, like those places mentioned today.
Glad you like them!
Woah. I saw this happen 😳. I was on a train to Waterloo going past it. It was pretty scary. RIP to those who died 😢
3:34 notice to airmen or NOTAM is not just a notice of things not to crash into but they can advise of abnormal flight maneuvers around airbases or inactive periods for airfields aswell as many other things.
Right now it’s a foggy day and some AHs are driving around without their headlights on.
Without their headlights on they’re invisible until the seemingly appear out of nowhere.
We had a car driving without their headlights on almost hit us because we couldn’t see them and made a left turn because we thought it was safe to do so.
There are 3 reasons for not having headlamps on during heavy fog. 1 ... Headlight switch is broken. 2... Driver is idiot and think's they're actually saving money on their home electric bill and 3.. Some cars have AUTO headlamps which turn on at night, but the high reflected light level of Fog during day-time, means the auto lamps may not come on. Decades ago Britain changed the law so if your windscreen wipers are on, your headlights must be on. Soon after , my uncle forgot to switch them off when he parked and ran his battery flat !
Flying a helicopter in IMC conditions is often deadly. Kobe Bryant found that out. It's up to the pilot to make that risk assessment for marginal conditions.
thank you for the video, and have a good day today too as well Mr Plainly Difficult
Thanks, you too!
This is why the idea of flying cars (inspired by drones) is stupid. These people who think flying cars are the answer to traffic congestion are the same people who would run into shit.
As long as there are lawyers there will probably NEVER be flying cars on a large scale. In the US every day we are bombarded with " Have you been in a accident? CALL 1800 SUE type commercials. Can you imagine the lawsuits?
The concept feels similar to 3d chess, as someone who's never played it. You're just adding more dimensions and layers, not actually solving anything. It overcomplicates things, and roads/flying paths would still be necessary so
Can you imagine running out of fuel while stuck in traffic in your flying car 😂
I guess everything could be AI driven, possibly without human override possible, if airborne traffic was real…
I hope I never see that!
Yup! They would be dropping out of the sky like flies.
Think the craine permit agency is also to blame by not requiring the crane to have air warning lights during low light conditions such as fog.
They obeyed the rules. It seems less excusable to me to fly in conditions in which you can't see clearly.
Flew around the US doing construction lifting with an old S-58, no other job like it!!!!
I remember working at St Thomas' Hospital and you could see the Vauxhall tower in the distance. A patient was reminded of the helicopter crash and was keen to talk about it.
Well done John, you found one that we knew very little about again. Last few have been done to death many times, Last one even Mentor Pilot did and did well. Very few chopper crashes I have seen. Not that I really went out of my way looking for them, just know not found their way down my feed. This comment comes from a very sold slightly misty part of Oxford UK
I remember this one happening and it being all over the news for about two days and then it just seemed to disappear from the collective consciousness and I have never heard anything since.
I was kind of excited to find out more about it and the results of the investigation. Really appreciate it 😁
This comment comes from a clear dry and chilly day in a part of Oxford, UK! (Hey fellow Oxfordian!)
Your theory makes sense - Never saw the incedent, saw the aftermath, for days, Visually, avoiding the scene, keep on Trucking.
Great work on your ambient album as well as the stellar videos
The best caption in news history may be on footage of a crane operator in Nashville who was trapped in their highrise crane cab during a storm that unleashed a tornado through Nashville. It reads, "Editor's note: This video includes the kind of graphic language that many adults would use if they were stuck in a crane with a tornado approaching."
We had a bunch more today. Spent some time in the basement with a bunch of friends who came over this evening.
Hope you're okay, this is manipulated weather 😡
Nicely drawn helicopter!
Thank you!
Agreed!
Brrr cold an wet in the U.K. same here in Portland, OR, USA. I can definitely relate!
Excellent video John!
See you next week!
Glad to see the foam finger pointer is back!!
Love the addition of the soundtrack! Very nice!
MI6 headquarters looks straight out of Joseph Stalin's 'Architectural Digest'.
As much as I want to make a quip about James Bond since this took place near the MI-6 building, I’ll behave myself out of respect for the victims and their families as well as Mister John who’s gracious enough to research and share these stories with us to begin with.
Just before watching this I watched a documentary about a woman who allegedly killed some people...with mushrooms. Boy I love when videos are unconnectedly connected!
My mum used to work with Matt (the casualty) in a T Shirt factory in Morden. He got to work early that day. He was a nice man apparently. Remembered everyone’s birthday at work. Don’t see that often.
I didn't know the word for it, but I recently experienced 'completion bias' for myself in a rather visceral way. (Everything turned out fine, but still.) Knowing it's a documented phenomenon just made a few things snap into place in my head. So thanks! :)
I remember the crane op was only late for work once on that job and it was that day
I remember seeing this on the TV News at the time... Hard to believe such a crash could happen in London, fog or no fog. Much like the Glasgow Clutha helecopter crash into a pub. Hindsight is a marvellous thing but after such accidents, surely clear lighting which signifies the presence of the height of construction cranes etc ought to be made visible as par for the course let alone flights which should be routed far from such congested areas...😳😢
Or ban flying over cities in fog....(except emergency services, of course, who may have to)
Hope yr weather improves. Brilliant well researched.
Thank you!!
„cold and wet“ - same here in northern Germany. Snow is melting. Now there's muddy weather and if your shoes aren't good enough you'll get wet feet.
I was working on that site and luckily had the day off!
We call it getthereitis. Happy Holidays John!
I remember walking to school in Wandsworth at the time, very foggy day.
WOW ! This intro was LOUD ! ufffff
My cat watched the helicopter very intently as it was moving around the map 😂
😂
I must be immune to completion bias. At least I am perfectly able to procrastinate any task at any time, task started or otherwise.
Excellent video! Helicopters are such strange designs. Just as a note, could you balance the intro music a bit in your next vids, it was /really/ loud compared to the narration.
The trumpet jingle oversaturate the output. Just use some dynamic compression ti equalise the audio level during the transition from the intro to the speech.
Thank you John, for the great video.
Greetings,
Anthony
The other day over in New Zealand,A helicopter crashed onto a building killing the pilot who was NOT authorized to fly at the time.He did not get permission to take the helicopter out which resulted in him flying onto the roof of a building in Auckland killing him and injuring a few others I believe.
There are old pilots, & bold pilots; but no old, bold pilots
Current story in Sydney Australia worth checking out is the Rozelle Interchange - a disaster of planning for a very expensive tunnell system gone wrong on many fronts. currently the talk of the town or shall I say ire of Sydeysiders.
what always got me about was the poor guy on the ground, probaly going to work, with all the normal worries , then out of nowhere , one of the most unlikely incidents to occur , being killed by a falling helicopter
Thanks for another interesting video!
Merci.
Thank you.❤❤
You are so welcome
Good morning everyone, morning John 😊
I gotta say, after listening to the new album, I'm REALLY vibing with it.
Glad to hear it in the new videos!! ❤
Yay, thank you! I really appreciate that!!
What new album?
@@Nemo_SignsJohn's music, i assume :)
@@PlainlyDifficult
Hey John, what's with the choice to put a 90s-chillout style track with this story? Haven't checked your album but I dunno if it's all like this
Doesn't really fit IMO, hearing about people getting killed and injured in the disaster segment to lift-style music was a bit of a tonal clash. Normally it feels a bit less upbeat and more respectful? Dunno, I'll check out your album and see if there are other moods to it
Pilots call completion bias “get-there-itis”. It’s the same thing that took down Kobe Bryant’s helicopter.
you should cover the clutha bar crash also. its a simeler situation that happened in glasgow in 2013
Being in that area is one thing but being that low is the inexplicable part.
Yeah I don’t get this. Why not climb above the height of the clouds? If he can’t see the heliport in clear visibility then land elsewhere.
I remember listening to this on LBC on the morning it happened, aside the crew onboard ; was always astonished that only one person died on the ground, could have been a lot worse.
There were no procedure changes? What
I know right!?!
They should've learned from this to have the crane's hazard lights on all the time like in many countries, or at least during foggy conditions!
I think this pilot might have been someone who worked on the bond films actually if I remember correctly. Bond and helicopters are just cursed.
Another excellent video!!! ❤😊🎉 Thank you!! ❤😊... So sad that the helicopter didn't make it!! 😢🙏💔💔... Just read in the comments that the crane operator overslept for the first time in years... he got there just as the helicopter crashed... 🙏💔💔.... As my mother would say... "sometimes it's just your time".... prayers to the families and all involved... 🙏💔💔😢
i feel like i can’t truly grasp the severity of situations like this bc the tallest building i’ve ever been in was like six stories. my brain just cannot process the idea of a building being 50 stories tall
Not sure how high up in a building I've ever been maximum, but certainly when I have been, about 6 stories up, it's startin' t' give me the HeeBee GeeBees feelings already. I'm a flatlander, through and through, used to ground floor, single storey living. Originally from Christchurch New ZEaland and although I lived in Perth Western Australia for a few years, but the first time I visited Sydney Australia and saw some of their tallest buildings, right in the inner city, I remember thinkin' "well I hope I'm NOT here, next time there's a decent Earthquake !"
I passed by on my train into Waterloo moments before this happened. Still think about it sometimes on my commute.
God damn! You played that excellent outro tune again! I love it!!
Can you PLEASE do a video on the washington bridge closure in Rhode Island, USA. Theres a lot of pictures and stuff showing what was wrong in the inspection and why they had to emergency shut it down, but from an outside perspective with little knowledge it just looks basically like “everything rusted while we were working on it.”
Bad Omen , , , I was walking away from the Building when I actually heard it happening, couldnt believe my ears !
I happened to be in London that day and was supposed to be meeting a friend at Vauxhall Station to go to an event at her friend’s house nearby. What a mess it was. We ended up meeting at the station just before it and walked. I remember walking past these burned cars; there was a coffeeshop either in or adjacent to Vauxhall station, and it was crammed full of police officers and other emergency workers.
We have to get you to 1 million subscribers
Wasn't the crane operator late that morning..his car door was frozen and made him late
I was living in London when this happened. We had just strolled by the crane the day prior. 😢
They really need to invent a helicopter hud with building mapping.
We have it.
But not fully implemented.
working on it. a HUD is trivial. Getting data to feed to it is the hard part. IR LIDAR looks promising.
Hope you are going well this time of the week. Keep being awesome
Thanks! You too!
Love the outro music
You need to do a video on the 1986 Cleveland balloon disaster!!!!
You missed the fact that the crane driver was late for work that day otherwise he'd have been in the crane cab at the time.
There was a NOTAM as well for the crane.
Glad to see no one was hurt. Johnny boy, Get off your high horse.
Warning lights should be common sense and not required by law and/or ignored.
I remember this happening but always thought it was in east London for some reason
FYI GCRST would be read as spoken as GULF CHARLEY ROMEO SIERRA TANGO. Just saying. Excellent videos. Thanks
Um… you’re mostly correct, except that it’s GOLF, CHARLIE…etc.
Usually atc will give a pilot a height to maintain, but in saying that, the pilot should be aware of all notams in the area they are flying as well as any alternatives
I lived in St George Wharf at the time, in one of the tiny flats on the interior of the building. Got woken up by the bang, couldn't figure out what it was, and went back to sleep for a couple of hours. Got a message from my boss asking if I was OK, and I asked why he was asking, so he pointed me at the news. Was a very odd and quiet week, as the main road was shut to position the relief crane. Got hate-crimed outside the entrance to the _The Gym_ a couple of months later and left London shortly after that.
As a pilot, I don’t really trust helicopters.
I’ve never been in one but I’ve heard they are a strange feeling!
I’ve never been in one but I’ve heard they are a strange feeling!
Pilots also fly helicopters. Maybe you haven’t heard of that. Keep training buddy you’re going to need it.
tbf i dont trust most pilots either 🤷♂️
My grandfather was in the Air Force and fought in the Korean war, he always said: "Helicopters go up, and they also come right back down too!" Felt like words to live by, but then again I can't imagine helicopters back then were crazy reliable either.
They put the critical info in the last sentence of their communiqué
Nice Mr. Music! i love mushrooms!