THE HELICOPTER which crashed in Kilmurray bog, Co Kildare, on Wednesday evening hit power lines crossing the deserted bog, leading to the deaths of the pilot instructor and his student.
Last night, as the wreckage of the aircraft was being removed from the bog, air crash investigators from the Department of Transport were looking at the possibility that the pilot had been simulating engine failure when the event occurred.
Graham Liddy, senior investigator at the scene, said “auto rotation”, ie simulation of engine failure, formed part of the 90-minute training programme being undertaken by pilot Colm Clancy and his student Dermot Sheridan on Wednesday night.
“The investigation into the crash is ongoing, and this is one of the possibilities we will be looking into,” Inspector Liddy said.
He said such training was likely to be carried out in a spot such as Kilmurry bog and not near an airfield, where the student might have been expecting such a training event to take place.
The bodies of the two victims were removed from the scene just before 6pm yesterday, six hours after the wreckage of the craft was spotted by Coast Guard helicopters searching the area when the men were reported missing.
Villagers watched sombrely as the hearse, escorted by two Garda vehicles, brought the remains from the bog for transport to Naas General Hospital, where a postmortem will be held today.
Gardaí and department investigators would not allow the media near the scene until the bodies were removed.
Shortly before 7pm reporters were escorted down a long bog road to within 500 metres of the scene.
Lifting gear had already been moved in to take the helicopter from the site to the Gormanston base where the investigation will be held and from where a preliminary report is expected to be released in about a week.
The aircraft lay on its side in the middle of the bogland between two electricity poles which had carried three strands of very strong power cable. Mr Liddy confirmed that the aircraft had struck the cables.
The red and white fuselage of the helicopter lay on one side, with wreckage from the machine strewn about 15m (50ft) away from where it had crash-landed.
Two of the rotors had become detached from the drive shaft and only one blade remained on the main rotor head.
Shocked residents of the village, which lies between Enfield and Edenderry, said they were stunned by the event, about which most were unaware until they heard it on the radio.
The bog itself can be accessed by a 2½-mile stretch of dirt track and the wreckage lay more than a mile and a half into the bog from the end of the dirt track.
“It is a terrible thing to think that two people died there last night and none of us were aware of anything,” one local woman said.