TFS,
I am a small boy compared to some of the guys I have flown with (in counting of hours anyway). The Geriatrics in the crewroom at Warri (they know to whom I refer) are very long in the tooth hours wise (and short of the other kind as age takes it's toll). Some of those guys are at or above 20,000 hours of safe flying.
My continued existence confirms the old saying about "Drunks and Fools" which makes me doubly safe.
A quick glance through my Army Flight School roster confirms the presence of a Guardian Angel somewhere close to me.
20 KIA, 1 MIA, 2 Killed after the tour....one of them in a car wreck and the other during a weather check that went IIMC in a non-IFR aircraft.
The 20 KIA went this way...one ditched an OH-6 in the ocean after an engine failure and drowned, one ran into the ground doing a lowlevel recce and crashed, one had either an engine or transmission failure over 200 foot trees and burned to death in the crash, one had a catastophic failure shortly after takeoff and all died, one botched a takeoff in an overloaded Cobra and died when the MR blade passed through the cockpits during the crash, two were lost at night in bad weather, one died in a mid-air collision with a flightmate, one was killed at his base camp by enemy artillery, and the rest were shot down.
The MIA survived being shotdown but then fell from the skid of the rescue aircraft at a height of about 350 feet. He is presumed dead still but has not been located or heard from since the incident.
There were four guys from my unit that died after their tour in Vietnam due to helicopter crashes while still in the Army.
I knew five pilots that died flying for my favorite British helicopter company.
My least favorite US company wrote off two that I knew, the second most favorite has written off three I knew, one of my other outifts has killed one and crippled another.
There are some more that have passed that I knew as well.
The odd thing about the accident stats is they do not seem to vary much over the years....we keep killing ourselves in the same old ways at about the same rate.
Helicopter flying and helicopters in general are much less forgiving than fixed wing aircraft and operations.