Nick and co
One thing that I have really enjoyed from this thread is the amount of extremely well researched reports that have been referenced and spot on comments from many thoughtful and well experienced dudes.
There is another article around if anyone can find it, from 1984 (I think) Rotor and Wing, titled “the subtle hazards of calm winds” It deals brilliantly with vortex ring, T/R vortices etc.
SAS
How many emerg in a career? in my case many, but I’ll keep it classified until they can me for being deaf and blind, probably not long to go, ,,, and I’ve been lucky to have used those experiences in training and saving many more others. However we are talking recips here.
The big end of town, what? A million hours a year on off shore stuff did I see? well mostly those guys just seem to keep trucking on, like Bader’s bus co. but we do hear often about many vibe problems, being able to recognise a potential problem in time, T/R bits cracking regularly, hot-end blades often having probs, esp. the types that then take out the primary flight controls and too often one of them decides to prove that vortex ring does hit em all, big and small.
The main trouble as we see it from the lighties is that whenever a biggie goes down, our insurance premiums skyrocket. And it bl@@@y hurts.
Down to the smaller end just the other day, on pprune a 47 missed out on doing a very simple straight ahead auto, after a power loss, (typical symptoms of the free-wheel, another rumour?) recently in OZ not one but two machines have been attacked by eagles going through the tail rotor. Always the unusual in this game.
At least one of those blokes could have done a much better job had he been up to speed with correct T/R failure training, a dude with 10k hours and excellent references in mustering!!
Just by reading these threads one finds plenty of bad news stories about emerg happening all the time, maybe that is the answer to your Q sas, if not we can always read about the ones that got away in Dick Smiths volumes??
Nick
I hear your frustration with people that crash A1 machines under the guise of check and training when in fact often the check pilot might have been pushing himself instead of the pupe, which proves that he was not skilled enough for the job for starters let alone the procedure he was supposedly enacting.
Hear my frustration too when I tell you about the largest percentage of the multitudes that turn up for interview from all over; they cannot hover, most have never seen full autos, vortex ring state, secondary effects of controls or jammed controls, confined area power checks are a joke, cannot shoot an approach consistent with a safe engine out profile, can’t do a W&B, don’t respect AUW, cannot read a map, the list goes on. And, the best part is that most reckon that I owe them a job, cheees.
More often than not they have this phobia about LTE; you know exactly what is going to happen the very first time they overpitch at a high DA and the tail starting moving, PANIC. That phobia is one of my pet hates and it is generated in loose pub talk by those who haven’t the faintest smick about, simple things, like how can a developed vortex bubble stay with the T/R at the accelerating rotational speed of the airframe?? If they had a real T/R failure from a bad spot they would have something to b’ well complain about. I feel very sorry for most of them and always very angry about the rip off merchants that exchanged these kids’ good cash for a piece of paper under the guise of flight instruction.
Having vented that spleen I am happy to say that there are some extremely good instructional outfits, whose names always gets mentioned when I get the old phone call, where, when, how, and some extremely proficient kids that they train, very proud of ‘their’ bit of paper.. and you know what? those ones always have the bubble cleaned ready and their shoes clean.
Two comments which I think were magic in this thread were;
1. “Modern error management theory”. No doubt there are institutes that gather and teach these theories, are there? If so I suggest two things, first you guys on this thread had better sign up as honorary deans, (and where has PF1 gone?) second but most important and always the hardest is how to get the theory to ‘walk the talk’ right down to the early operational stage right after licence issue, of every pilot where it is needed most?
2. “The golden Hour”. This in itself is a major driver of pushing ‘hero pilot one’ into a confrontation with WX that he doesn’t need. In fact it may be a real medical statistic but it has no place in any air regs that I have ever seen. Once again the capacity for kids (anyone) to say NO needs to be a major currency check list item. The relevance of MEL also needs to take a walk, it really means this component is U/S, but the driver who is hanging onto the same old sticks as yesterday, all last month, maybe doesn’t gather what U/S is until things get sticky and then, Oh s*@# no rad alt and I cant see the water.
Perhaps a comparative study could be done on the numbers of EMS flights that went horribly wrong and the numbers of fatalities, as against the survivability probability of the patients. How many times do we read that the patient had a greenstick fracture or less? It may be nearly always three crew to one patient, rule #1, or sometimes the crew + patient + a family member, to none, rule #2.
Why is it that any EMS job should be anything other than a routine flight operating under routine procedures? A major phobia shift in this department of thinking would clear a lot of our cluttered lawn space.
TOD
Good article sport, a mate of mine did a stint with china, hauling freight, on long hauls but with shorter legs as the idea was to carry big mobs of freight not fuel. And yes he talked about the really nice brand new 747s with all the great gizmos but he also talked about the massive duty times on some trips. Up to 23 hours and sure, nearly all landings were hosted by the aeroplane but he reckoned at the end of those legs one would have only had to ‘drop a plug’,---‘so to speak’ and it would have been all over red rover. An amusing side of the job was how to discuss politics for six hours straight with a Chinese nationalist so as to stay awake?
TET