What's in your cockpit?
The following article is from 2005. Nearly 1 decade ago....
Presented to International Helicopter Safety Symposium
Montreal QC
Sept. 2005
Roy G. Fox
Bell Helicopters Textron Inc.
The single most-important improvement in helicopter safety
could be driven by documented information of what happened
(or not) in the cockpit during an accident sequence.
Accident investigators and regulators don’t know details.
Pilot error is largely based on circumstantial evidence, and
ends up with accident causes such as “failed to maintain
RPM,” “failed to maintain clearance,” “fuel exhaustion,”—
the list goes on.
FUTURE CHALLENGES AND DIRECTIONS
The helicopter industry, including the regulatory side, needs
to work on these major roadblocks. For example, HUMS—
possible maintenance credits and alerting a pilot of an impending
problem—is always a good subject for a lively discussion.
We need research and trial programs to build a
more robust and useful HUMS, to be able to validate that the
HUMS indication occurs XX hours before a catastrophic
component failure. With such confidence, the pilot should
be alerted that the helicopter requires an inspection before
another flight. We in the industry and the regulatory agencies
must work together to find ways to make improvements
and also make use of technologies developed from outside of
aviation.
The largest single problem that prevents helicopters from
rising to the safety level of the airlines is that we do not
know what is happening in the cockpit. If you don’t
understand what happened in a crash, you cannot fix
anything and these human error accidents continue year after
year. We must find a way to document what is happening in
the cockpit, and that information must be retained in crash survivable
media or transmitted outside of the aircraft.
Many contend that we already have Flight Data Recorders
(FDRs) and Cockpit Voice Recorders (CVRs) to provide this
information. This comment is misleading. Reference 14
discussed the fallacy of this, as very few helicopters have
FDRs. Since the FDR requirement of 14CFR135 is for
multi-turbine powered helicopters with 10 or more
passengers, the maximum number of helicopters meeting
those requirements (including those not operating under
14CFR135) would be only 6.5% of the U.S. civil helicopter
fleet.
The helicopter industry needs a Cockpit Information Recorder
(CIR) to provide information inside the cockpit before
and during a crash. This information will allow the
accident investigators to understand what actually happened
(or not) in those human and unknown caused accidents.
Once we can document and understand the actions and sequences,
we can make the appropriate corrections. This
knowledge on every helicopter accident can save costs/time
of accident investigations, reduce regulatory concerns, and
speed up corrections to the field. Most importantly, it would
allow us to correct and mitigate the human error accidents
and raise helicopter safety to a new level. Reference 14 describes
these benefits and issues regarding a CIR. A CIR
should contain:
• A still color camera (day/night)
• An area microphone
• A GPS
• Data processing/memory capability
• Crash survivable recorder.
A CIR unit would likely contain the first four items and provide
output to existing crash-survivable recorders. A typical
still shot photo would include the
instrument panel and the pilot’s controls (cyclic, collective,
and pedals). A CIR could be a “poor man’s FDR/CVR.”
Further in the future, we should make the CIR wireless. An
onboard transmitter would be added to transmit analyzed
critical data to a satellite, to a land line via Internet to the
Operator’s PC and the Manufacture’s PC.
The PC would be programmed to determine if a crash occurred (e.g.,
analysis of GPS data for anomalies). If analysis indicates a
crash and no human action occurred from the operator in a
few minutes, the PC would automatically notify the Search
and Rescue function. The PC alert message would provide
aircraft identification, time of last contact, and
longitude/latitude of the wreckage. This would shorten
rescue response time, which increases the probability of
survival. This satellite transmission approach is already
being used now for helicopter flight following with a small
GPS unit. The automotive industry has this GPS tracking
and crash alerting capability (when airbag deploys) in GM’s
OnStar® system in many of their automobiles.
SUMMARY/CONCLUSIONS
Helicopter safety has been improving over the years. The
accident frequency appears to be flat or even increasing.
The accident rates due to airworthiness issues remain very
low and consistent year-to-year. Industry will continue to
keep airworthiness issues corrected. The largest single potential
area to make significant improvement in safety is in
understanding what went on in the cockpit of each accident
helicopter. Once we can document the cockpit information
and sequence, we can finally understand and aggressively
attack those accident causes. A Cockpit Information Recorder
(CIR) tied to a crash-survivable recorder can allow
quicker, more complete, less costly accident investigations.
This would allow safety problems to be corrected in weeks,
not years. The CIR provides the potential to reduce our
helicopter accident rate by at least half if not two-thirds.
The CIR can provide facts and understanding, which is required
to go to the next plateau level of safety.
Last edited by blackdog7; 11th Jan 2014 at 07:40.