Qualla: 2018 Leicester Helicopter Crash

2018 Leicester Helicopter Crash: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jaruphat, CC BY-SA 4.0. The post-match broadcast had already moved on. BT Sport cameras lingered on the King Power Stadium pitch as a Leonardo AW169 helicopter rose into the floodlit air, its rotors a familiar sound to Leicester City fans who had watched their chairman arrive and depart this way for years. Then, at about 200 feet above the ground, the aircraft began to spin. It crashed in Car Park E, just two hundred metres from the touchline where Leicester had drawn 1-1 with West Ham an hour earlier, and burst into flames. All five people on board were killed: pilot Eric Swaffer, his partner and fellow pilot Izabela Roza Lechowicz, club chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, and his staff members Nusara Suknamai and Kaveporn Punpare. The date was 27 October 2018. For a club, a city, and a family on the other side of the world in Thailand, nothing about that night would feel ordinary again.

Image: Jaruphat | CC BY-SA 4.0

2018 Leicester Helicopter Crash: The Man Who Believed in Leicester

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jaruphat, CC BY-SA 4.0. Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha bought Leicester City in 2010, when the club was languishing in the Championship and the idea of a Premier League title seemed like a fantasy that no rational person would underwrite. He underwrote it anyway. The Thai billionaire, who had built his King P...

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2018 Leicester Helicopter Crash: Five Lives, Eighty Seconds

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jaruphat, CC BY-SA 4.0. The aircraft had departed Fairoaks Airport in Surrey earlier that day, picked up Vichai and his staff at the London Heliport, and reached Leicester's training ground by mid-afternoon. The party went by car to the stadium for the match. The plan after the final whistle was unremar...

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2018 Leicester Helicopter Crash: A Castellated Nut

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jaruphat, CC BY-SA 4.0. Aviation investigations often turn on details so small they sound almost insulting in the face of what they cause. The Air Accidents Investigation Branch eventually traced the crash to a tail rotor actuator control shaft - the component that translates a pilot's pedal pressure in...

Image: Jaruphat | CC BY-SA 4.0

2018 Leicester Helicopter Crash: Five Thousand to One

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jaruphat, CC BY-SA 4.0. Leicester's response to the crash became, in its quiet way, a piece of the city's modern identity. Tens of thousands of fans laid flowers and scarves outside the stadium in the days that followed. Wembley was floodlit in blue. The club opened a book of condolence; the Foxes Found...

Image: Jaruphat | CC BY-SA 4.0