Rescue Pilot Killed in Wisconsin Helicopter Crash

BELLEVUE -- A rescue helicopter pilot's actions just before he crashed Thursday probably saved lives on the ground, according to George Miller, director of flight operations at EAGLE III.

Jim Vincent, 46, of Menominee, Mich., was killed Thursday when the EAGLE III helicopter he was piloting spun out of control and plunged into a field next to the County Rescue's Allouez Avenue headquarters.

The aircraft, which served as the group's backup helicopter, was on a local maintenance flight with only Vincent aboard.

"Jim Vincent, when he had this problem, was near our building, and there were other people on the ground, and he did everything he could to get the aircraft away from the building and crash it where it crashed so that he wouldn't hurt anybody," Miller said.

"He flew the aircraft all the way to the ground," Miller said. "He did what he was supposed to do, from what we can tell. Unfortunately, it wasn't his day."

Investigators from the Federal Aviation Administration were on scene late Thursday to begin their inquiry into what brought the helicopter down, a process that could take between 12 and 18 months to conclude. National Transportation Safety Board investigators were due on scene today.

Bellevue resident Jerry Rhodes was driving on Allouez Avenue when he saw the helicopter "spinning around in circles" about 500 feet in the air.

The helicopter spun toward a set of apartment buildings, then hovered briefly over the field before plummeting to the ground, Rhodes said. "It came toward us, going around in circles and then suddenly just dropped," Rhodes said. "It didn't look like he was landing."

Rhodes said he saw the pilot stumble out of the wreckage and fall about 20 feet from the smashed fuselage.

Paramedics took Vincent from the scene by ambulance, which received a multicar police escort, to St. Vincent Hospital, where he died.Miller said there is some speculation as to what went wrong but no clear answers.

"I mean, we can all guess what happened, but (Vincent) got out a Mayday call, so he obviously had a mechanical (problem) of some type," Miller said Thursday night. "The NTSB will be here tomorrow and that's their job -- to figure out what happened and what went wrong."

Meanwhile, the rescue service will be on the job.

"Out of our deep respect for our deceased co-worker, friend and family member, the flight crews at EAGLE III have pledged to continue our important life-saving missions throughout these difficult times," said Tom Madigan, head of County Rescue Services Inc., the air ambulance group's parent company.

Fire and rescue crews responded to the scene minutes after the 10:30 a.m. crash, dousing the wreckage with water and placing absorbent barriers around the crushed aircraft to soak up spilled aviation fuel.

"We will get to this bottom of this tragedy," said Madigan. "We will find out what happened and we will do everything humanly possible to prevent it from ever happening again."

Madigan said the helicopter's airframe, which has logged about 4,800 hours, was inspected on March 22 and the aircraft's avionics -- radio and other instrumentation -- were inspected Wednesday. County Rescue's air ambulance service has not had an accident since it took delivery of its first helicopter. The program began in May 1998 with the purchase of a $1.8 million Bell 407 aircraft and construction of a $200,000 hangar and helipad at the Bellevue headquarters. The service has since upgraded the size and range of its helicopters.

The aircraft that crashed Thursday was a twin-engine Eurocopter BO105LS built in 1987 and owned by a Utah bank and leased by County Rescue. It was put in service when County Rescue's $4.7 million EC135 was not available.

Employees at Argus Financial, 1794 Allouez Ave., are fairly used to hearing the County Rescue helicopter flying overhead, but they knew something was wrong with the strange sound it was making on Thursday morning.

"The sound was all wrong. Then we heard a thump," said Connie Ashley, who works at Argus. When she walked outside, all she could see was "a very destroyed helicopter -- just a big pile of metal."

A spinning helicopter usually indicates the loss of the tail rotor, which keeps the helicopter straight, said Al Timmerman, a retired Green Bay Police Department commander and longtime aviation enthusiast who has flown a helicopter for about four years.

Helicopter pilots practice a maneuver -- called autorotation -- to deal with just such an emergency. The pilot essentially cuts power to the overhead rotor blades, which prompts them to act like a weather vane in the wind and lets the aircraft to glide down to safety.

However, without enough altitude or air speed, things can go badly -- quickly, Timmerman said.

"It just sounds like (Vincent) was low and he was slow, and when his tail rotor failed -- and I don't know the particulars of the case -- it just sounds like he didn't have enough time to react or to go into an autorotation procedure."

A few dozen children and their caretakers at the Bellevue Children's World Learning Center began to watch the helicopter as they often do from their nearby building on Bellevue Street, said child-care worker Kellie Hermsen.

"I said, 'Look, everybody,' not knowing that the helicopter was going out of control," recounted Hermsen while standing across the street as a crew covered the wreckage with a tarp. "We saw it go down. And we counted to three -- everybody in our day care counted to three -- and all of a sudden, we heard, 'Boom,' and so we knew something happened."

Madigan said it was a traumatic day for a close-knit group of people accustomed to rescuing others -- not one of their own.

"This is a tragedy of monumental proportions for the victim, his family, friends and the good people involved at EAGLE III," Madigan said. "We can't adequately express to you how deeply saddened we are by all of this. Our prayers go out to the family of the pilot on board. It is the commitment of EAGLE III that we do everything in our power to find the cause and make certain that this never repeats."