A father, his son and two friends were killed after their helicopter crashed in appalling weather, moments after trying to make an emergency landing, investigators said.
All were killed after the relatively inexperienced pilots lost control of the craft in bad weather in Cumbria, moments after take-off, according to an investigation report by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB).
Minutes before, the aircr
aft had flown orbits around farm buildings suggesting they realised the weather was too bad to fly, but had decided not to attempt a landing.
Peter Patrick, 68, from Arkholme, near Carnforth, Lancashire, was with his son, Anderson Patrick, 37, of Askwith, West Yorkshire, who was at the controls of the helicopter, along with their friends, Gary Priestley, 39, of Hipperholme, Halifax, West Yorkshire, and Tim Newburn, 39, of Brighouse, West Yorkshire.
Mr Patrick Snr, a successful businessman, had just started his retirement and was a former Master of the Vale of Lune Hunt in Lancashire and Bedale Hunt in Yorkshire.
His son, known as Andy, a keen pilot, had taken over the family construction business from his father. He was married to wife Jilly, with three children, Grace, four, Abbey, three, and one-year-old Jonty.
The father and son built up a successful family business called Termrim Construction Limited, based in Huddersfield, over the past 30 years.
All four men had set off on August 3 last year on a hunting trip to Scotland aboard the Robinson R44 II Raven helicopter. It is not clear who among them was the second pilot.
The craft had been hired from the flying school at Leeds/Bradford Airport with Mr Patrick Jnr and the two other men from West Yorkshire leaving the airport at 5.41pm.
They then flew across the Pennines to Arkholme, near Mr Patrick Snr's house, arriving at 6.11pm, to pick up the older man before setting off to fly to Cornockle, near Lockerbie, at 6.28pm.
When the helicopter did not arrive relatives rang the men's mobiles which rang out and a search was begun.
But at just gone 10am a farmer found the wreckage on a small hill, just a few miles from its final take-off point.
A local pilot said weather conditions were bad with low cloud and visibility down to 1,500 metres - the minimum distance under which some pilots can fly.
Neither of the pilots aboard, nor the helicopter were approved under Civil Aviation Authority to fly using just their instruments, the AAIB report said.
Pilots should also not fly lower than 500 feet, but a data recorder recovered from the aircraft after the crash showed it flew as low as 200 feet, before carrying out "circling manoeuvres" while trying to land in the bad weather.
The last data recorded was at 6.36pm when the craft went down around 400m from junction 36 of the M6.
Wreckage was strewn over a wide area but engineers determined before the helicopter set off there were no technical faults and it had not broken up in flight.
The aircraft was also overloaded by 80lbs and it's centre of gravity was outside flying limits - making it more difficult to fly, the AAIB report concluded.
It was travelling at between 50 and 80 knots, diving slightly and banking to the right when it crashed.
The report concluded: "Control was lost after the helicopter entered an area of poor weather conditions, during which the pilots were probably unable to maintain VMC (visual and meteorological conditions).
"The helicopter entered a descending turn but flew into the ground in a level attitude...it is considered that the pilot was either attempting to recover to controlled flight using the instruments, or had become visual with the ground at a low height and was attempting to recover from a dive.
"Whilst the occupants were all wearing three-point harnesses, the impact was such that the accident was not survivable.
"No technical causal factors were identified to explain this accident."
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