SASless:
Lets try another way....what markings were on the side of the aircraft? Lifeflight, Lifeguard, Air Life....did the aircraft have EMS interiors, were the aircraft licensed as ambulances?
Aircraft get "licensed" as ambulances? Man, I need to learn more about the EMS industry.
Look, all's I'm saying is that just because these helicopters were painted up to look like ambulances, it had nothing to do with the crashes....UNLESS someone can point out to my feeble brain how these accidents were fundamentally different because of their mission. They could have been private, corporate or air-taxi ships in the same scenarios with the same outcomes. And I believe that the NTSB will see that relatively quickly.
Neither aircraft were on a strictly EMS mission at the time, which makes that factor incidental. So why point the accusing finger at EMS? I don't see the relevance. Was there some EMS necessity for flying that low up the Potomac River? (One story I read said radar returns indicated that the helicopter was at 100' +/- 50'.)
For the Mississippi crash, was there some peculiar EMS necessity for taking off and flying in very poor weather at night? The pilot was merely repositioning it to Faulkner University or a nearby hospital pad to park it for the night, no? In other words, just exactly what were the EMS issues that factored into these crashes? They were helicopter crashes, plain and simple. To say that they occurred because they were on an "EMS mission" is a red herring.
If these two helicopters had been painted with corporate colors, or television station logos, would we be championing the NTSB to investigate those market segments? Of course not.
Do we crash more aircraft after dark?
I cannot answer this, as it is not a valid question. As you know, the actual hard number of aircraft crashed after dark is irrelevant. We must compare the number of hours flown in daylight to the number of hours flown after sunset. The
rate of aircraft accidents at night is probably higher, yes. But that is just my gut talking (although that rumbling might be that I have not had breakfast yet).
SASless, your posts are usually intelligent and sane. And I understand your passion about safety, especially with regard to the GOM and EMS segments. But I think it is wrong to lump these particular two accidents into the EMS category. We need to look deeper at why helicopters crash in general.