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Black Hawk rotor fails more than a mile high; pilots land safely

Three South Carolina National Guard helicopter pilots walked away from a harrowing Dec. 3 emergency landing in which their UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter reportedly plummeted 6,000 feet in less than a minute after a main rotor failure. The two pilots (the third pilot was a passenger) managed to land the helicopter in a field not…

Three South Carolina National Guard helicopter pilots walked away from a harrowing Dec. 3 emergency landing in which their UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter reportedly plummeted 6,000 feet in less than a minute after a main rotor failure.

The two pilots (the third pilot was a passenger) managed to land the helicopter in a field not far from a water treatment plant, a school and residences near I-77 just a couple miles southeast of Columbia, South Carolina, not far from Fort Jackson.

Four days later a CH-47 Chinook helicopter sling-loaded the downed aircraft to McEntire Joint National Guard Base in Eastover, South Carolina.

S.C. National Guard Recovers Helicopter

via Black Hawk rotor fails more than a mile high; pilots land safely.

Main rotor blades shouldn’t look like that, fyi.

It’s amazing the imbalance didn’t cause the hub to fail.

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  1. SFC Dunlap 173d RVN

    I so smell a deserving winner of this years “Broken Wing” award…that main rotor should have disintegrated by the looks of the one blade!!

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  2. Shaun Evertson

    ?
    The A/T story seems a little goofy. Are they talking rotor or motor or both?

    “After a loud bang during the instrumentation flight, a vibration began and quickly escalated; it turned out that the motor had died.”

    6k” auto post engine failure can be sporty, but alone wouldn’t rate much of a story. Combination of engine out and delamination of the blade? Wonder if most of the composite structure shedding occurred when they pulled pitch to flare.

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  3. LT Rusty

    Something is definitely goofy about the way the blade failed, too – my first thought was impact, that’s the trailing edge of the blade!

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  4. ChrisP

    Yeah, “Motor” or “Rotor”?
    WTF, O?
    The rotor-blade delamination looks pretty scary. That kind of imbalance could lead to the main-bearing failing and the aircraft coming apart.
    On the other paw, a flame-out at a mile-high is a “cake-walk”. You are no where near “Dead-mans Curve”. Altitude in a helicopter converts to airspeed. An auto-rotation from there is easy .
    I would be doing an audit on the facility that “re-furbed” that blade.
    Much ado about nothing…

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