Originally Posted by
HeliComparator
I think what I am really saying is that humans are extremely bad at quantifying risk, and have a wide range of risk tolerance according to what the activity is. For quantifying risk they will say “Oooh look, that looks really dangerous” without having any concept of what the actual accident statistics are.
I do a lot of gliding in the highlands of Scotland, lots of people think it is highly dangerous. I mean, flying around without an engine? Must be crazy! People refuse to go up because they are too scared.
Recently the wives of two of our gliding club members have had bad accidents, one a broken leg, the other multiple fractures and is wheelchair bound for several months pending recovery. Did they crash in a glider? Of course not, one was a mountain biking accident, the other a skiing accident. Meanwhile no-one at the club has suffered any sort of injury from gliding. So mountainbiking is wonderful. Skiing is lovely, But GLIDING??? NO WAY! Not rational!
Getting back more on topic, I think the 225 head detachment thing was pretty horrific. The pilots were just flying along minding their own business, then BANG - curtains. Not the slightest hint of pilot error. Very nasty.
Meanwhile various other pilots have come to grief due to crashing due to - in our eyes - incompetence and stupidity. Happens relatively often. We would never possibly do that kind of stupid thing, obviously. We are great, wonderful pilots!
But the thing is, those “stupid” pilots all thought they were wonderful too. And maybe they were, most of the time. This is the thing with pilot-induced accidents, it is something that only happens to other people. It could never happen to us. Meanwhile we certainly don’t want to fly a helicopter with a quickly detachable rotor head because we have no control over that, whereas we do have control over not crashing due to being incompetent - because we are wonderful pilots!
However if you look at it from the pax perspective, they don’t particularly care whether they die from a QD rotor head, or from pilot incompetence. Either way, they are dodo-like. Same applies to the cold hard statistics. One needs to look at why bad accidents happen and what can be done to prevent or reduce them. Any pilot is horrified at the thought of the QD rotor head activating its QD function unexpectedly, but we gloss over the possibility that we might be the next cause of an accident. It is all rather illogical,
A helicopter that is better at guiding the pilots away from doing something stupid, is therefore probably the safer aircraft even if it did once suffer from a catastrophic mechanical failure, because the mechanical failure is not the primary source of crashery.
Yes I hear you and broken out statistically in that way pilot error v mechanical failure winner. But it isn’t winning so either the data is being presented badly or the idiots aren’t listening.
Overlying the entire mood will be why it took the 2016 accident to get the manufacturer to find it’s solution which it suggested there was nothing to see before - hence how 2016 could have happened.
That majors upon trust and now the feedback loop to data and how the systems are so much better, etc and…it’s no surprise it isn’t winning. The only way it could is to throw the prior management of EC/Airbus heli under the bus and present the facts / process. Oh and remember the false EMLUB failure alarms in 2 ditching still requires mindfulness that even the best systems errr.