Anniversary of helicopter crash in Winter Park

At 5:03 p.m. on May 22, 1997, a Bell 206B helicopter took off from Orlando Executive Airport with three prominent, longtime Winter Park residents on board.

Looking through the lens of his Pentax 6x7 camera, photographer Phil Eschbach leaned out the copter’s side window to focus on National Bank of Commerce — now Commerce National Bank & Trust — 1,200 feet below at the intersection of U.S. Highway 17-92 and Orange Avenue in Winter Park. Bank president Guy Colado sat in front of him, with Patrick Perrott, co-owner of Park Plaza Gardens Restaurant on Park Avenue, piloting at his side.

The roar of the engine and swirl of the propeller drowned out the clicks of Eschbach’s camera, and the Thursday evening rush-hour traffic stacked up on the roads below as people traveled out of town for Memorial Day weekend.

Seven minutes into the flight, at 5:10 p.m., Eschbach’s view began to change.

“All the sudden the helicopter was bouncing all around, then all the sudden I saw trees and branches all around,” Eschbach said.

The next things he saw were the crushed remnants of the helicopter crinkled around him like a stepped-on tin can, and the blue sky above as he peered, barely conscious, out of the now up-facing left side window of the destroyed helicopter.

The helicopter had gone into a tailspin and came to a crashing halt in the backyard of a 1940s home two streets over from the bank, at 1451 Norfolk Ave.

“We missed the electric (power) lines by inches, a swimming pool by inches, a swing set just barely … so many things were so lucky,” Eschbach said.

Moments after the helicopter plummeted through a six-story-tall oak tree and hit the ground, a man’s face appeared in the mangled window.

“Are you OK?” he asked.

Eschbach assumed it was the home’s owner. He surveyed what he could see of himself pinned in his seat by the rubble. “I think so,” he replied.

The stranger looking through the helicopter window wasn’t the home’s owner, but a neighbor drawn out by the thunderous sound of the descending chopper.

The real homeowner was Stuart Culley, who was halfway home from a business trip in Miami when the helicopter hit. His wife, Pam, and two daughters were inside. In a time before widespread cell phones, he had called to tell his wife he was leaving his hotel, and was stunned when he arrived two hours later to find that his road was blocked by a herd of police cars and fire trucks.

“What’s going on?” he asked the police officer blocking his entrance to Norfolk Avenue.

“There’s been an accident,” the officer replied.

He told the officer that he lived where all the emergency vehicles were centered and needed to get home.

“Are you Mr. Culley?” the officer asked. “We need you down here now.”

Share your memories of the May 22, 1997 crash in the comment section below, or on our Facebook page. Read the original Orlando Sentinel story about the crash here: tinyurl.com/HelicoptercrashWP

Culley didn’t stop to take the keys out of the ignition or close his van door before he took off in a sprint down the street. When he found his family, they were fine, but he was surprised to find a tangled mass of metal resting just feet from his home’s bay window. Shoes, scrap metal and pieces of the helicopter’s seats littered the once-grassy backyard. The earth was now black and muddied from the flame-retardant liquid the fire department had used to coat the crash site to stop it from catching fire.

“I went out at night and it looked like a whale, just resting on its side like that,” Culley said.

His home was scratch-free. The only mark left by the crash was a splattering of blood on the back sheathing. An arm of the propeller, set free during the copter’s descent, came to rest next to a neighboring chain link fence, which was now sliced open.

“If that had come this way, they told me, it would have ended up in the front yard,” Culley said of the propeller. “It would have had enough momentum to have gone through all the walls of sheetrock in the house and landed in the front yard.”

Culley gives credit to pilot Patrick Perrott for maneuvering the crashing copter into the tree to cushion the impact, and just far enough away from his — and neighboring — homes, so that no one on the ground was injured.

“Whether it was skill or he was just lucky, he did a great job,” Culley said.

It was with even more luck that all three passengers in the helicopter survived the crash, Eschbach said.

“It’s rare, I’m told, that anyone survives a helicopter crash,” he said, “let alone all three.”

Perrott and Colado were airlifted — each by helicopter — in serious condition to nearby hospitals, while Eschbach was transported by ambulance to Florida Hospital. His left foot had been nearly severed when the front seat of the copter crashed down on it during impact.

Eschbach’s souvenirs from the crash include the pale jagged scar that circles his left ankle, where doctors from the Jewett Orthopaedic Clinic in Winter Park reattached his foot, and his Pentax camera that survived the crash dent-free. The corrosive liquid sprayed by firemen on the scene to prevent a fire, however, rendered it useless.

For years after, Eschbach said, people approached him about the crash. “They’d say, ‘You were in that helicopter crash weren’t you?’ or ‘I was stuck in that bottlenecking traffic — it was because of you!’” he said, laughing at the memory.

“It made a big splash because nothing like that ever happens in Winter Park.”

Lt. Tom Pearson with the Winter Park Police Department confirmed that the 1997 crash is the only helicopter incident on record in the city.

Culley, who still lives in the home where the copter crashed, said it’s something he and his family never expected, and will certainly never forget, even 15 years later.

“It was an experience, that’s for sure,” Culley said. “I know I haven’t, nor ever will, set foot in a helicopter after that.”