OK, so it wasn’t an accident; it’s just that the NASA folks are getting rather good at intentionally crashing helicopters. The latest in its series of engineered rotorcraft crashes was conducted earlier this month when the agency dropped the more than four-and-a-half-ton fuselage of a former U.S. Navy CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter for the second time in little more than a year. Over the past five years the agency has conducted the crashes in partnership with the FAA, the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army at NASA Langley’s Landing and Impact Research facility, a 240-foot-high, 400-foot-long gantry, which was originally used by the Apollo Astronauts to practice moon landings.
In the most recent test another surplus sacrificial CH-46 was once again painted to resemble something hoping to hide itself on the African savannahs. Its striking polka-dot-on-white scheme enabled high-speed cameras, which followed the plunge at 500 images per second, to precisely chronicle the impact distortion through the process of full-field photogrammetry. When the aircraft was released from its cables, gravity did its thing, slamming the fuselage down through the arc of a pendulum at a speed of 30 mph, “a severe but survivable crash, according to civilian and military standards.”
A lifelong aviation enthusiast who joined AIN in 2007, Curt came to the publication from the broadcast industry where he was a national science and technology television reporter and producer. He writes on the FBO field, aviation finance, and sustainable aviation and occasionally contributes to AIN sister publication Business Jet Traveler. Curt was a member of the AINtv reporting staff that won the 2008 Aerospace Journalist of the Year award for Best Airshow Daily. That same year, he was a finalist for another AJOYA award. He earned an AJOYA for Best Business Aviation Submission in 2018 and was a finalist in that category in 2021. He received the National Air Transportation Association’s Aviation Journalist Award in 2012 and won a Pegasus Sapphire Business Aviation Award for outstanding journalism in 2021.
Before joining AIN, Curt worked with Consumer Reports’ television division, CRTV, and for several local television news staffs. An honors graduate of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he earned a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Boston University in 1995. Curt lives in New York State with his wife and two young sons.
