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ANALYSIS / Circumstances surrounding Cobra crash
By Amos Harel
Tags: IAF crash, Amos Harel

The Israel Defense Forces and the Israel Air Force refrained Wednesday night from releasing detailed information on the circumstances surrounding Wednesday night's Cobra helicopter accident, in which two reserve pilots were killed. The details that were gathered in the hours immediately following the accident are still very sketchy, hence the care being taken not to jump to conclusions that cannot be substantiated.

The statements made by civilian eyewitnesses, however, support the suspicion that the accident was caused by a technical malfunction. Observers on the ground reported seeing a rotor detach from the body of the helicopter before the crash. (According to a different version, the tail section may have become detached first.) The decoding of the commmunications will be critical to an understanding of the accident: Apparently the pilots in the helicopter that crashed managed to issue an unclear message about the occurrence of a malfunction, saying that they were attempting to land.

The crash of a Cobra due to technical malfunction is a relatively rare occurrence. However, one must consider that these are aircraft that have passed the 30-year mark, and that their maintenance becomes more and more complex as they age. The investigation into the accident could take months. It took nearly two years after the most recent helicopter accident, involving an Apache during the Second Lebanon War, before the IAF and Boeing, the manufacturer, managed to reach an agreement over the cause of the accident - a technical malfunction involving the detachment of the rotor.
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The IAF has enormous experience in investigating accidents. Members of the Safety and Quality Control Administration rely on decades of thorough investigations, the overwhelming majority of which have succeeded in establishing the truth. Fortunately, in recent years they have had less work to do, with the exception of the last war. During that period there were three in-air collisions in which three helicopters and one combat aircraft crashed. (An additional helicopter, a Yasur, was shot down by Hezbollah.)

The "watershed" for the IAF in terms of accidents was, of course, the helicopter disaster of February 1997, when two Yasurs crashed midair, with 73 casualties. Since then enormous efforts have been invested in reducing accidents, resulting in a drastic decline in their numbers. All IAF commanders, beginning with Eitan Ben-Eliahu, played a role in that effort.

The two pilots who died Wednesday were air force reserve officers, both with long years of experience. If the cause of the accident genuinely was a technical malfunction ("The initial indications point toward that," a senior officer said last night), then their chances of saving themselves in these circumstance would have been very small. There are precious few seconds between the time one identifies a malfunction and slamming into the ground, during which the pilots tried in vain to land their craft safely.

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