Re: Three Dead....Another Night Bad Weather Flight Over Dark Terrain
Well said SASless. Pilots are an easy target when they are no longer in a position to respond or defend their actions. The system should take a good long introspective look at itself. The FAA refuses to address the real issue, weather minimums. Presently, the ceiling and visibility requirements for day/night VFR remote area EMS missions are much lower than common sense would call for. In many instances the weather observations utilized for go no-go decisions are not located sufficiently close to be meaningful with respect to the mission. As a result, EMS crews accept missions with little or no information specific to the actual flight. This information becomes available in real time during the flight. 99.9% of the time, flight crews get away with this, completing the mission with only a scary tale to tell. It is the other 0.1% that gets all the press and discussion time on this and other sites. We operate a SPIFR Bell 230UT. This machine gives us true IFR capability for inter-facility flights and a bailout capability should we back ourselves into a dark low visibility corner in the middle of the night. This capability comes at a significant cost above that of the typical single pilot VFR EMS operation. A cost that many would say is difficult to justify. IFR scene flights are at least one technology leap into the future. This task is achievable but at what expense. In the meantime, each crew has the responsibly to make prudent decisions with respect to go/no-go. No-go should always be the decision and than line up the elements that lead to a GO. Management pressure is never one of the elements.