NEW DETAILS in SMURD crash case. Who was piloting
(UPDATE 10:36) The State secretary Raed Arafat has declare for Publika TV that Voicu Socae had the right to pilot the SMURD chopper. He had an experience of 1015 flight hours on this kind of helicopter.
(09:27) New details are appearing in the SMURD crash file case. The chopper was flown by the younger pilot Voicu Socae, and not the commander of Iasi base.
That was because his superior did not have the authorization to fly the rescue chopper. The aircraft had a video camera on board, and the images could help investigators to discover the causes of the crash. Until now, all assumptions are leading to a human error.
The last discussion between the pilot and the control tower is now evidence in the prosecutors’ files. The same is with the images recorded on board. The chopper has a camera on board, as all Romanian SMURD aircrafts have. The camera records all flight parameters, and the investigators have to analyze what it recorded before the crash.
The board recorder, a black box for choppers, the evidence on the site of the crash, and the images from the board of the SMURD chopper, are leading the investigators to a possible piloting error.
The chopper had tens of kilometers to pass to reach Cahul. It was flying very low because of the low cloud ceiling. The pilot has ascended and saw high tension poles in front of him. The aircraft has avoided the high-voltage cables, and the pilot would have wanted to realign the chopper to the preferred height. That was the moment when the chopper hit the tops of trees above which was flying at the moment.
The chopper broke the trees on a length of almost 80 meters, has disintegrated and crashed. This is the main assumption of the crash. Moreover, the control tower has warned the pilots about the weather.
The person flying the chopper was Voicu Socae. As copilot was the commander of Iasi base, the investigation sources say. And that is because Doru Gavril had to pass the exam in order to pilot this type of helicopter. Doru Gavril had more than 4,000 hours of flight, but not all of them on Eurocopter.