ASN Wikibase Occurrence # 71196
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| Date: | Saturday 6 September 2008 |
| Time: | 22:35 LT |
| Type: |  Robinson R44 II |
| Owner/operator: | Shmakov SA |
| Registration: | RA-04180 |
| MSN: | 10961 |
| Fatalities: | Fatalities: 3 / Occupants: 3 |
| Aircraft damage: | Destroyed |
| Category: | Accident |
| Location: | 15 km west of Kuzmino Village, Smolensk Region -
 Russia
|
| Phase: | Take off |
| Nature: | Private |
| Departure airport: | 15 km west of Kuzmino Village, Smolensk Region |
| Confidence Rating: |  Information verified through data from accident investigation authorities |
On September 6, 2008, at 18:35 UTC (22:35 Local Time), a Robinson R-44-II, registration RA-04180, crashed in a wildlife preserve 300 meters from takeoff location due to loss of control in flight in IMC (fog). The accident location was 15 km west of Kuzmino Village, Smolensk Region, Russia. The helicopter was substantially damaged. The pilot and one passenger were killed, and one passenger was seriously injured and died on September 25, 2008.
According to a rough translation from Russian into English of a contemporary report (see link #2 for the original Russian text):
"Banker's guerrilla flight ended in a swamp
Near Smolensk crashed helicopter Robinson
08.09.2008
On the night of Sunday, in the Smolensk region, a private Robinson R44 helicopter crashed, in which Dmitry Mozolevsky, deputy chairman of the Moscow Bank Preodolenie, was returning from a hunt to the base. The pilot accompanying the banker and the huntsman died on the spot. Mr. Mozolevsky himself survived by a miracle — when struck, he was thrown out of the car, which was lit up a second later. The circumstances of the disaster are being investigated, but already today it is clear that the R44 pilot overestimated his capabilities, having decided to fly in the dark over the treetops.
Since the only survivor of the catastrophe is the banker Dmitry Mozolevsky, and he is in intensive care with severe injuries and burns, the experts have not yet managed to restore the exact picture of the incident. It was preliminarily established that the four-seater Robinson served the members of the Hunt's Revival Fund, a private hunting farm created by the leaders of Preodolenie Bank in the Sychevsky District of the Smolensk Region. The territories leased to the fund are covered with impassable forests and swamped; therefore, bankers can move around their hunting grounds only by tracked or air transport.
On Saturday, late in the evening, Robinson transferred the deputy chairman of the “Overcoming” Mozolevsky, who is also the head of the foundation itself, to the hunting farm’s base. About 15 km from the base, Robinson caught on the treetops and collapsed into a swamp. A moment later, kerosene splashed out of the fuel tanks of the car and spilled over the surface of the water. The pilot accompanying Mr. Mozolevsky and the huntsman were burned with the car. The same fate must have awaited the banker himself, but he was thrown out through the open door even during the fall. The head of the foundation, who received several fractures and burns, miraculously found the strength to contact a hunting base by mobile phone and name the approximate coordinates of the accident site. The chasseur on the two tracked sanitary transporters found the victim only a few hours later, and the banker was only allowed to deliver the banker to the district hospital of the village of Sychevka by 6.30 the next day. Only on Sunday morning, they learned about the incident in the district police departments and the Ministry of Emergency Situations, after which firefighters and an investigative team were sent to the crash site. Rescuers managed to evacuate the corpses of the huntsman and the pilot only by the evening of yesterday.
Experts of the Interstate Aviation Committee and the Federal Air Transport Agency will find out the causes of the disaster. So far, according to their words, it is only known that the Robinson flight was unauthorized - the pilot did not receive permission for it, and having already risen into the air, did not report to the dispatchers about his movements. If the helicopter pilot had requested permission to fly a light helicopter that was not equipped with a radio altimeter, they would definitely recommend it to wait for the morning. “To fly the R44 in the dark is about the same thing as driving a car at night with the lights off,” famous helicopter pilot Artem Kurpitko told Kommersant. do it when you go in the so-called partisan regime, that is, you have to cuddle up to the ground so that you will not be spotted by radar. The fact is that on the R44, as a rule, there are no radio altimeters giving the pilot the exact value of the flight altitude, and you are forced to focus only on the approximate value obtained by recalculating the atmospheric pressure. In this situation, every head of the tree is a deadly threat. "
Sources:
NTSB
2. https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1023051
3. http://www.helicopter.su/pressa/articles/2009/08/27/vzletyi_i_padeniya_vertoletov_robinson/
4. http://www.plam.ru/transportavi/vzlyot_2009_05/p17.php
5. http://www.griffin-helicopters.co.uk/accidentdetails.aspx?accidentkey=49622
Revision history:
| Date/time | Contributor | Updates |
|---|---|---|
| 08-Jan-2010 00:45 | 502 | Added |
| 09-Jan-2010 05:07 | 502 | Updated [Source] |
| 28-Dec-2013 07:28 | 502 | Updated [Time, Total fatalities, Location, Source, Narrative] |
| 03-Nov-2018 17:58 | Dr.John Smith | Updated [Time, Operator, Departure airport, Source, Narrative] |
| 03-Nov-2018 18:01 | Dr.John Smith | Updated [Time, Aircraft type, Narrative] |
| 03-Nov-2018 18:02 | Dr.John Smith | Updated [Source] |
| 03-Nov-2018 18:05 | Dr.John Smith | Updated [Narrative] |
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