{"id":5507,"date":"2013-05-10T11:33:45","date_gmt":"2013-05-10T08:33:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greekhelicopters.gr\/helos\/?p=5507"},"modified":"2013-05-13T11:38:27","modified_gmt":"2013-05-13T08:38:27","slug":"robinson-r22-autorotates-successfully-onto-honolulu-street","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greekhelicopters.gr\/helos\/robinson-r22-autorotates-successfully-onto-honolulu-street\/","title":{"rendered":"Robinson R22 Autorotates Successfully onto Honolulu Street"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>HONOLULU
\nA routine afternoon in Downtown Honolulu turned into one of fright and alarm just before 3:20 p.m. on Wednesday, when a small helicopter made a hard landing onto a city street, skidded nearly 50 feet, then hit a parked car.<\/p>\n

The drama had a happy ending, however, as the pilot and her passenger walked away from the landing, and no one on the ground was injured.<\/p>\n

The single-engine, two-passenger helicopter came down on Fort Street, just mauka of Beretania Street, shortly before 3:30 p.m. The pilot, 30-year-old Julia Link, was flying with veteran photographer Karl Hedberg of Aerial Photography Hawaii. <\/p>\n

Hedberg said link did all the right things, and that the hard landing was almost perfect — except for a parked car on the right side of Fort Street.<\/p>\n

“About the only time I felt my interior get a little shaky is after our skids were down, we did the spin, we hit the car, at that point, yeah,” he said.<\/p>\n

A cut to Hedberg’s scalp was the only injury from the landing. He said he didn’t need any stitches.<\/p>\n

Hedberg, 71, has been an aerial photographer for more than 40 years. He and Link had just completed a shoot over the Punchbowl and Makiki areas when the engine apparently failed. “Let’s see if I got all the shots,” he recalled thinking, “because you can’t go back up once you’re on the ground. And that’s when everything went silent.”<\/p>\n

Hedberg said the incident was a controlled hard landing. “The helicopter is called a rotor wing. And it forms a bit of a parachute as it comes down,” he said. “The idea is to bring it down, flare out, as she did, drop the skids down, and set it down.”<\/p>\n

The pilot was not hurt, and no one on the ground was injured, despite the fact that there were plenty of people around.<\/p>\n

“It came down low, came right over my car,” said Patti Hookano, who had just turned right out of the Pali Longs Drugs parking lot. “And then of course I was going slow, wondering what was going to happen, then it just crashed right into that car right there and I pulled over.”<\/p>\n

The car’s owner, a Hawaii Pacific University student, says he had just finished taking a final exam when he walked outside and found out his car had been wrecked.<\/p>\n

“I just bought it a year ago,” said Matthew Lau. “Now it’s wrecked.”<\/p>\n

The Robinson R-22 copter is owned by Mauna Loa Helicopters. This isn’t the first time the company has experienced a hard landing incident. In May of last year, another Robinson helicopter went down in Kona, resulting in minor injuries to two men.<\/p>\n

The helicopter in today’s downtown landing was towed back to the airport idea for further investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration into what caused the engine failure.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2013 Hawaii News Now<\/a>. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n