Indeed a very good discussion with many salient points being made and received. But looking over this (and other) threads I’m going to take a bold stance and proclaim that thus far the two most important things the helicopter industry, particularly the EMS industry, could take from the fixed-wing airline industry have not even been mentioned yet. Those items are:
1) the mentality.
2) the go/no-go decision making process.
In many of the recent fatal EMS crashes the main cause could be summed up as “going flying when they should have stayed on the ground”; faulty pre-flight decision making.
If an EMS pilot accepts a flight in atrocious weather, more often than not the flight ends up being completed successfully. This leads to rueful smiles, some admiring looks and comments along the lines of “those guys are crazy…but God bless ‘em”. Even from their colleagues.
Contrast this with what an airline pilot who pushes on to a destination and completes an approach in weather below minimums can expect. Disgust or worse from his cockpit colleague, who, unless he happens to be a junior FO on probation will likely report him to the Chief Pilot, scorn from his peers and disciplinary action from those in authority. In fact, whether his career will continue is by no means certain.
The mentality in the airline industry was not always thus. Just like the civilian helicopter industry really got going after the Vietnam conflict and was heavily influenced by it, so the airline industry really got going after WWII and was heavily influenced by that. A “press on” attitude engendered by an apprenticeship in mortal combat took years of effort to eliminate. Part of that change was in the go/no-go decision.
See, these days, an airline pilot does not really take the go/no-go decision. Of course, if he is not sure the flight can be safely completed for whatever reason he has the authority to cancel it; but the weather part of the decision has been all but taken away from him in Operations Specifications, Ops Manuals and published approach minima. If an airline pilot is confronted with weather, reported or forecast, below minima for his departure, destination or en route, he is prohibited from going. These minima are not nationwide boilerplate, they depend on the type of approach aids available, minima published for these approaches, type of aircraft, onboard equipment, crew qualifications (mainly experience on type) and many more factors. The numbers are plugged into the formula and the decision rolls out, black or white. This is done by a dispatcher and checked by the captain, removing pressure on the crew to “give it a try”. Some wise people realized that putting the onus of the go/no-go decision squarely on the flight crew only led to (self-generated or otherwise) pressure to complete flights, so the decision was taken out of the crews’ hands while of course retaining their power of veto.
Contrast this with the state of affairs in the EMS industry. When the dispatcher (whose job is not to tell clients when flights are not possible) calls the pilot, the pilot knows three things:
1) people are hurt or they wouldn’t have called;
2) the program needs to fly in order to make money;
3) you have to be in the air in minutes so you have less than minutes to make your decision.
Is there anything in the above list that doesn’t put pressure on the pilot, who has to make the decision, to say “let’s give it a try”? In this case the authorities have provided for guidance one set of weather limits which are so relaxed, especially at night, that they might as well be replaced with one word: GO. And these limits are the same nationwide: from the mountains of Alaska to the deserts of New Mexico to the fog-spewing Great Lakes to the sea of light that is Los Angeles… Am I the only one who thinks this can’t be right?
Interesting philosophical dissertation, Buitenzorg, but what about some practical solutions you might say. Well, these factors can be addressed, but only in a long, consistent and concerted effort by both the operators and authorities. I would suggest the following: first, Chief Pilots and the most experienced line pilots have to sit down and divide the areas of operations for the various bases into geographical areas where the weather is usually consistent (so those areas would be defined by features such as rivers, lakes, mountain ranges etc. rather than state and county lines). For each of those geographical areas a set of weather minimums is then decided upon, and just as importantly, an acceptable means of determining whether those minimums are met. There are so many AWOS, ASOS and ATIS around the country, this must be possible. If the nearest reporting station is 50 miles away, raise the minimums accordingly to stay safe. Preferably at least 3 stations must report above minimums to trigger a “GO” decision; if even one is below minimums, the flight must be declined, and if one station is u/s the minimums for the remaining two must be raised. Then, the FAA is involved by their POI reviewing the decision-making process and criteria proposed by the operator’s Chief and senior pilots, and accepting it by including it in the operator’s Operations Manual, giving it regulatory status. The advantages of this system is that the go/no-go decision is in fact taken by the operator’s most experienced pilots together, over cups of coffee in a stress-free environment. For the line pilot the go/no-go decision is reduced to simply checking numbers; of course without removing the pilot’s power of veto to cancel a flight. The dispatcher could and should in fact use these criteria to inform clients that “the weather is below acceptable minimums” rather than call back in several minutes with the news that “the pilot doesn’t think he should go”.
The second and hardest part will be enforcing this system to the point where no one even thinks of “going for a look and if it’s too bad we can always come back”. Line pilots must be required to keep and file the weather information they used to arrive at a “GO” decision. A Chief Pilot should always know if one of his bases was subject to generally poor weather and if there were any flights from that base, so he then reviews the briefed weather for those flights. Any pilots who took off despite below-minimum weather briefs must be disciplined. The FAA POI must play his part by requesting the same documentation and coming down on any operator that doesn’t take internal action.
Minima for the various areas can be adjusted (only in a more restrictive manner) for such things as pilot experience (lack of) or less capable equipment, or for scene calls vs. inter-facility transfers. A pilot new to a base could be restricted initially to day missions, after 100 hours to night missions with the minimums raised by +3miles and +1000 feet, and after 50 night hours and a checkride, the Operations Manual minima. This is just an example, but you get the general idea.
Such a system will lead to fewer flights going; but how many less? Will it really make that much of a difference? And one other thing: stop thinking of EMS helicopters as a god-given right. People were having heart attacks and car crashes long before the first EMS helicopter ever took to the air, and them having to ride in ambulances was not considered outrageous.
The reason why I’m not so euphoric about getting better gadgets in the cockpit is that I’m familiar with helicopter pilots; most of us will think of these gadgets as ways of completing flights in worse weather than before; to improve the completion rate rather than the safety of the operation. Until this attitude is comprehensively changed all the improvements in aircraft and equipment design will be chaff before the wind.
The biggest problem I see with this proposal is getting the necessary close and long-term involvement of the FAA. It will require a relatively large number of EMS-helicopter-savvy POIs, working almost full-time on the EMS operators in their areas and violating those who break the rules; and the “hands off, well obviously the pilot was at fault” attitude we’ve seen so far makes that seem unlikely to happen.
Let the flaming begin!