Quick!
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Thanks for the ear worm. I’m gonna have to watch Wedding Singer tonight.
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These aren’t the gees that make you pass out.
The effect of spinning like this is equivalent to negative gee in an airplane - the blood rushes into your head. Even 1 negative gee is uncomfortable (think hanging upside down at the playground). 2 hurts. 4 hurts a lot, and will generally start to rupture small blood vessels in your eyes and face. Top-flight aerobatic pilots don’t like to do more than 6 or so.
Every body will have a different threshold at which something goes pop in the brain and you take damage or die. But you’ll be excruciatingly conscious right up to that point.
Now I’m off to figure out how much effective gee this poor hiker’s head was under.
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Back of the envelope:
Max rotation was about 2 revs/sec. Call omega ~ 12rad/s.
Distance from the pivot to the head: r ~.5m
So tangential velocity = omega * r = 6m/s
centripetal acceleration = v^2/r = 36/.5 = 72 m/s^2
since g = 9.8m/s^2, that puts the hiker’s head under about -7 gees!
It was probably half that or less for most of the event, but even -3.5 hurts a lot.
It’s also worth noting that the victim’s feet were under positive gee, so maybe that ameliorates things.
Unless I screwed something up, the acceleration was very dangerous. Add the spinning, and that’s a very bad day.
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No, first they’d have to spin the rotors the opposite way for a while to cancel out her spin. Then they can turn them off. Problem solved.
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I saw this on social media and one of the comments was “I hope the rescuers are ok”
Granny is pulling 6 G’s in a basket and you’re worried about the guys sitting in the helicopter???
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Pretty sure his feet are experiencing even more negative G than his head. If the pivot was in the center, the feet would experience as much negative G as the head (by symmetry). The pivot isn’t in the center, but it’s closer to the head, so the feet should experience more negative G. I’m pretty sure no part of the body is experiencing positive G (it’s spinning, so everything is getting stretched longitudinally thanks to angular momentum).
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Tucson offers much better desert mountain views, with less danger of getting into this situation. Just sayin’.
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They couldn’t even get the basket close enough to bottom of the helicopter to manually stop the spin because the pilot kept the wheels down. If the basket hit the starboard main landing gear, the patient would have been in a world of hurt.
The rescuer on the ground should have had a stabilizing rope on one end of the basket. This is pretty much the norm for this work.
Back you go for retraining, guys!
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Why wasn’t landing an option?
It looks like it slows and reverses spin at least once, which I’d imagine is a good thing. But I’m still definitely going to hell for how hard I laughed.
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The only thing that would make the situation even more tragicomedy-slapstick would be if they tried to lower the rapidly spinning hiker down into a patch of cactus.
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Sorry, I should have been more clear. Why are they hoisting at all instead of landing and loading?
It’s hard to tell from the angle of the video but I think the rescue took place on hilly terrain where it would’ve been difficult to safety land a helicopter.
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Phoenix FD are a damned good bunch. OTOH, everyone screws up sometimes and when lives are at stake there’s no “well, better luck next time.” You review the incident mercilessly and make sure that if something similar happens again it’s because you did everything possible to prevent it and sometimes you fail.
ER is not going to cut you any slack at all if your patient arrives following a reletively minor injury with aspirated vomitus, followed by a protracted admission, probably pneumonia or even asphyxia. Lungs are sensitive, the passages and alveoli clog up very easily, and stomach contents are incredibly irritating not to mention loaded with particulates.
We are trained to avoid the possibility. Full stop. I’m only a volunteer and have been fortunate enough to only work two fatalities. One bled out internally while waiting for transport and the other had jello for his forebrain when he arrived at Barrows – but he arrived there warm, pink, and with every freaking transplantable organ in top condition, lungs included despite vomiting for as long as there was anything to vomit. So, yeah – you don’t take the chance.
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There is - you can see where it SHOULD have been attached, a stub of a line dangling off the basket.
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Phoenix FD has a LOT of experience fishing people off of mountains. They didn’t have someone with a “tail rope” on the ground to stabilize the basket.
That’s a crappy role, because the rotor wash is kicking up a blizzard of rocks and crap.
Watch Phoenix FD doing it right. on this one At 2:47 you can see the stabilizing line going down to the ground.
They forgot that bit.
ADDING:
That may be Phoenix Police doing the bad lift … their helicopters are blue and white.
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Rub it in – but Tucson has a mountain that can sometimes be skied, too. I’m not exactly unfamiliar with Tucson-- attended UA, $HERSELF graduated from UA, one of hte kids took her BA there, and both sons have graduate degrees from there (one is still there for his doctorate.)
But be fair – the Catalinas (or the Pass) are good weekend hiking if you’re in Tucson but not many people are going to drive from Phoenix to hike Sabino.
