‘Mayday!’ ends pleasure flight
Pilot, passenger face long recoveries from injuries, lawyer says
On Aug. 11, Tim Brown got the chance to do something he had long wanted to do — take a ride in a helicopter.
The ride was a birthday gift from his wife, said family friend Emil Giordano, a retired Northampton County judge and attorney who is representing Brown. The retired arts teacher was going to take a bird’s-eye tour of the Lehigh Valley in a 14-year-old Schweizer 269C, a small helicopter operated by Ace Pilot aviation training school at Lehigh Valley International Airport.
A little after 2:30 p.m., Brown, 51, climbed aboard the helicopter, settled in beside pilot Matt McMillan and took to the air.
Giordano said the aircraft rose perhaps 100 feet when McMillan started shouting “Mayday!” For a moment, Brown thought it was a prank. Then the helicopter clipped the roof of an industrial park building at 981 Postal Road and crashed.
Despite being belted in, Brown “was thrown from the helicopter and was able to crawl away,” Giordano said. “(McMillan) was still strapped in it.”
A passerby, who Giordano said was a retired military emergency medical technician, pulled McMillan from the wreckage, Giordano said.
According to Giordano, the wreckage caught fire. State police said there is no evidence of that, though chemical fire suppressant was sprayed as a precaution.
Brown and McMillan suffered extensive injuries. According to a GoFundMe page set up by McMillan’s family to raise money for expenses, the young pilot had multiple spinal fractures and a traumatic brain injury. He has had spinal surgery and remains sedated to help his healing. The campaign has raised over $13,000 as of Tuesday.
“While Matt has shown signs of being able to move all of his limbs, his physical recovery will likely take months, and the cognitive and emotional recovery will last years even with proper care,” the site says.
Giordano said Brown, who has been discharged from the hospital, suffered serious injuries to three vertebrae, a severe foot injury that became infected, a broken rib “and very serious psychological fallout.”
Brown, who is retired from the Cedar Crest College arts faculty and now works at the Macungie Institute, a community arts center, was supposed to help his son move into his college dormitory Tuesday for his freshman year.
McMillan’s Facebook page says he originally comes from North Carolina and studied helicopter aviation in the Middle Georgia State University Flight Department.
The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the incident, a process that can take months.
The McMillan GoFundMe page says the pilot had an “obsessive commitment to safety” and there are “clues that he was attempting to make an emergency landing to save himself and the passenger.”
Giordano said there is a video of the flight that would have been given to Brown as a keepsake of his tour, and it may shed light on events.
A National Transportation Safety Board database dating back to 1985 lists more than 200 accidents involving the Schweizer 269C, including 19 involving fatalities.
One incident, in June 2014, involved an Ace Pilot craft that developed “ground resonance” — a rotor imbalance — when the student pilot shut down the engines after a 40-minute flight at LVIA.
The craft “shook itself apart,” in the words of the report, which blamed the incident on “inadequate inspection and maintenance of the helicopter’s landing gear dampers.”
Someone who picked up the phone at Ace Pilot aviation training school Tuesday morning said “no comment” and then hung up.
Giordano said he is awaiting more information to determine how to proceed.
“At this point we’re just waiting to see what the FAA says,” he said.