Helicopter Accident Stats

[wde]

I have been musing recently over our internal accident rate / 100,000 hrs and have come to ponder whether a more relevant rate should be applied to the rotor world.

In our company, with a large fleet of SE VFR aircraft, we average about 60000 hrs each year with an average # of landings of 3.3 landings per flight hr - about 200,000 landings per year.

Now - do most RW accidents happen near Mother Earth? Bladestrikes, CFIT, etc. Would it make sense to use accidents / 100,000 landings? In the FW world, what is the applicable #? 3 hrs of flight per landing? For 60,000 hrs of flying, that would be only 20,000 landings. Would this logic lead to a stats bank that would lend it self to more relevant comparisons?

Just some questions to start a discussion - Is there a better way to study incident / accident data with a goal to have the analysis reveal different solutions to the issue of RW accidents?

Fire away ...

wde

[MLHeliwrench]

Add the number of picks during ext. ops to the landings as well.

You are right in that a long leg cruising well below max MGT or torque is arguably less prone to a hairy situation.

[Helinut]

I think it probably depends upon what you want to do with the stats. It is also likely to depend upon the detail of information you have.

When I have done such analysis in the past, I have considered landings/take-offs as well as flight hours. If you start to separate things out into different flight phases, then you will need to allocate the accidents and incidents into those phases too, in order to get a meaningful rate.