Printed in HeliOps magazine circa 2007:
The IHST’s Challenge The FAA and the HAI have joined forces to form a safety team to reduce helicopter accidents by 80% in 10 years. Their efforts to date have been terrific, and the ground work will surely yield results. It seems that simply the enlistment of the organizations and people they have fostered is enough to assure results. Also, their methodical desire to attain sorely needed data is right on target. Look at their website, better yet, join the effort!
Home One aspect that deserves discussion is that the IHST seem to have taken a classic inside-out look at accidents, working from cockpit and carefully documenting the apparent cause. They are working inside the current airspace system and so their data reports the shortcomings of the operations within the system that is in place, rather than what the data might be in a system that might be, if we cleaned up the larger problems we have. Why can’t we study and fix each the cause of accident, and therefore solve the problems? Let’s use an analogy.
Imagine that, on the Planet Mongo, a great percentage of car accidents are occurring. The Mongoians are concerned, and they launch a scientific team to find out what is happening.The accident team finds that surprised drivers suddenly strike unseen trees. “The cars needed good tree detectors,” they decide, and they set about developing new tree detectors for car dashboards. The Mongoians discovered that drivers are driving into ponds. They state that “There is a great need for better pond detection, and even map displays to show the ponds, and better driver training to be sure drivers read the Pond Digest” and so a great effort is launched to plot the ponds on the new dashboard navigators and to train drivers to avoid those pesky ponds. The Mongo dwellers also find that “Drivers were not studying their weather reports and sunset charts, and were therefore driving into snow drifts and across plowed fields in the darkness.”
The accident investigators determine that much training time and money must be spent making sure that drivers carefully plan their drives, and consult the known snow, weather and sunset data.But one safety expert on Mongo said, “By systematically noting every accident, we could piecewise fix each direct cause, and miss the major, fundamental problems that our system presents to us.”“When you are inside a box, it is hard to know the color the box,”she said, wisely.
You see, on the planet Mongo, where all those car accidents occur, and where the investigators find the need to make the drivers better, and train harder, where they are burdening the cars with more and more equipment, there are no roads. Not a road, not a highway, no white stripes, no Motorway signs, no traffic lights. No Jersey barriers, no off ramps, no banked curves. Each driver starts his car and drives into fresh new ground, heading wherever he wants, unmarred by any large scale path planning, unworried about speed limits, planned maneuver radius, traffic control, stop signs and the like. This lack of roads (which have not been invented on Mongo) is a stunning problem to the accident investigators, because they don’t even know that roads could exist. With no roads, the driver bears the responsibility for avoiding all trees, snow drifts and ponds. With no roads, every drive is fresh and new, and cannot learn from the last drive. Without roads, every driver’s judgment is all that stands between success and failure, each tree avoidance relies on a new, fresh judgment, and every driver must make thousands of these judgments on every drive. To miss one such judgment means an accident, and to a Mongo Investigator, it means the need for new driver training and new dashboard equipment.
What is our point? Helicopters desperately need Helicopter Flight Infrastructure, with routes, approaches, departures. If we are not careful in our accident investigation, if we settle for the low-level intermediate causes, we could miss this potentially big finding. What did route and approach infrastructure bring to airplane aviation 70 years ago?
Routes bring pre-packaged navigation guidance. They relieve the pilots from the burden of planning altitudes, obstacles, and let-down points. Like canned soup, the work is done for you, by experts. Infrastructure, especially instrument approaches and departures, relieves pilots of continuous judgment about mundane things. EMS and Offshore accidents are rife with crews that make the seemingly bone-headed mistake during critical takeoff and landing scenarios. Initial approach routes, precision approaches and standard instrument departures reduce the need for judgment, regulate the activities into trainable segments under clear airspace control. In doing so, those judgments not made allow pilot cognitive workload for the things that can’t be regulated, making the entire flight safer. Will routes shackle helicopters and prevent our missions? No, not if they are helicopter routes that harness the awesome memory of modern flight management computers that can hold hundreds of routes and approaches. It is possible to surround every city with dozens of precision approaches to highway intersections, hospitals, businesses, and oil platforms using WAAS and little else.
The FAA crossed this infrastructure bridge years ago. The FAA realized that airplane operations required approaches and departures with firm guidance and weather minimums that support the bill-paying public. VOR’s were invented to keep airplane airliners on track to destinations, ATC was invented to prevent airplane mid air collisions and guide flights safely to touchdown. Airplane non-precision procedures for scheduled carriers were virtually eliminated in the 1960’s and 70’s when the FAA realized that the tendency for pilots to peek was too much. As a result, hundreds of ILS systems were installed at small airports and 200 and ½ minimums became the standard.
Shouldn’t we helicopter people sit down and ask ourselves, like those investigators on the planet Mongo, “What is wrong with this picture?”How can we allow night “VFR”operations offshore, into sky as black as the inside of a cow, and then wring our hands and “seek data” when we lose a helicopter airliner every few years to FITWO? How can we watch EMS operators launch on VFR flights into the darkness with low ceilings to pick up injured patients, when the ease of full instrument approaches to highway intersections and hospitals has been demonstrated in dozens of trials? Helicopters deserve the same respect as airplanes, especially when the Satellite Nav tools are just waiting to be used. Why is radar the separation tool and 3 mile separation the rule when WAAS is accurate to within a few meters and ADS-B data packages can be swapped automatically? Why does VHF radio range set the minimum airway altitude when a company like FEDEX can track a truck and talk to its drivers anywhere on the planet? With tools like this having been available for the last ten years, why are there NO helicopter precision approaches to any heliport or hospital, and no helicopter low altitude routes anywhere? We are inside the box, but a few of us can see what the outside is like.
IHST, keep up the good work, and please be sure you use your excellent data to fix the root cause of the problems!