Thoughts on the video "That Others May Live"
"not much had happened that week, there wasn't a single flight... eager to take the flight."
(Pressure to accept dispatch, self-imposed, also called 'motivated pilot')
"The weather was no good because of the clouds. They asked if..."
(A motivated pilot properly exercises judgement, ultimately proven absolutely correct. The correct decision taken by the pilot is inappropriately influenced.)
"We too off... and there's no way... cancelled, turned around..."
(And again, the pilot's decision is that conditions are not acceptable by the PIC on the scene.)
"Can you maybe go the alternate landing spot? It was clear there, because we had flown over it..."
(The safe conservative decision to not attempt this flight is again inappropriately interfered by the company.)
The pilot's narrative indicates that he is nervous about the situation at the alternate landing site "I'd been looking at that light, it's so dark behind it..." "After several minutes... low level fog developing.."
(I'm not there, so I don't know, but at this point I'm telling the crew they have a choice, they can leave with me or ride the ambulance to the hospital. But this is a 'motivated pilot', not me. The trap is apparent if you will only see it.)
"Yep, there's 'glows around the lights'. Okay, let's go. Get on board. We're leaving and we're leaving now!" "Without the patient on board, Denver had already lifted the helicopter... when they noticed that the ambulance had finally arrived. Well shoot what are we going to do [the decisive error, the decision has been made by the PIC. Now the med crew is flying.]... seven minutes later...
(From this point on, with dispatch and the med crew having put the PIC in the scenario he attempted to avoid, he has to deal with it as it exists.)
Comments:
This pilot made all the right decisions until his foot was in the bear trap. Further, he proved all the capabilities required when tested after the fact. Which proves that nobody in the management chain KNOWS what's wrong. The answer is apparently changing the name of this phase of the industry from HEMS to HAA...
Hire, train and support good people, especially pilots. This pilot had integrity, knowledge, motivation and capability but was betrayed by those he worked with. No means no, shut up or fire somebody if you have the wrong people in the job.
The FAA, Airbus and the industry should be ashamed of the false representations made regarding cockpit videos. The camera was absolutely no help with this pilot's predicament. Airbus's talking heads postulate that management, which positively created this incident should hold more effective tools to blame pilots is wrong as this incident demonstrated multiple times. The answer isn't more outside the cockpit influence on pilot action, it's better training, support and information for the PIC to do the job. Which is expensive and inconvenient and largely a mystery to the industry.
To those discussing HAA/HEMS pilot schedules, the rule cited deals with crew scheduling and assumes rest. This rule works pretty well with daytime operations. My opinion is that the rule fails to deal with night operations generally and HAA/HEMS in particular, perhaps being a primary contributor to the fact the nights are 4 times more dangerous compared to day flights in my work. The rule spectacularly ignores proven physiological issues and presents an illusion of adequacy by doing so.