I know I'm being mean saying this but......

I am utterly sick of the over-sentimentalised claptrap spouted every time someone dies in an accident of any kind. Have you noticed that everyone who dies tragically is always a wonderful human being or an 'AMAZING' person. Do the scum bags of society never die in road accidents? I'm sure that it's covered by that pathetic old platitude about not speaking ill of the dead. But personally I've never understood that. Surely it's hypocritical to speak of anyone any differently when they are dead than when they were alive. And being dead at least they can't come back and plant one on your bean.

But I digress. Please don't get me wrong about this. I did not know Pete Barnes - the helicopter pilot who died on Wednesday in the crash in Vauxhall. I'm quite sure he was a decent chap and will be missed enormously by his family.

What is irritating me is that the press are now producing headlines like this:

Brother says pilot would have 'instinctively' wanted to minimise casualties

AND

The lives of others would have been at the forefront of his mind

Can we just be clear about something? When a helicopter loses its rotor blades (as happened here), it not only loses it's propulsion system but also the equivalent of a conventional aircraft's wings and control surfaces.
A helicopter without rotor blades has all the aerodynamic characteristics of a boulder and more or less drops out of the sky according to the velocity it may have at impact.

I'm sure Pete Barnes' thought of many things in his last seconds. He may even have regretted what was going to happen on the ground but there was ABSOLUTELY nothing he could have done to minimise casualties below. He wasn't wrestling with the controls while looking for a clear space on which to land because:
a) He would not have had time.
b) The controls were simply not attached to anything functional.


That more people were not killed was simply a matter of happenstance, of luck.