Originally Posted by
aa777888
For all you Robinson bashers, a quick search of the NTSB database shows that, for 2017 to date, the following breakdown of accidents by manufacturer:
Sikorsky - 2 (11 fatalities total)
Schweizer - 3
All other types - 6 (2 fatalities total)
Hughes/MD - 8 (6 fatalities total)
Airbus/Eurocopter - 9 (1 fatality total)
Bell - 25 (20 fatalities total)
Robinson - 34 (17 fatalities total)
Bell seems to be holding its own with Robinson in the accident and fatality departments. I did this sort of quick study for a previous year and Bells actually had more accidents and fatalities than Robinsons. And yet they are one of the most respected makes. Should we not be flying Bell helicopters, either? Of course not.
I'm unable to find any data showing hours flown by each make, but it's easy to suspect that both Robinson and Bell are the busiest. Given that Robinsons do the bulk of the training in the US, that's a lot of hours doing high risk stuff. Similarly, it's easy to visualize that Bells are doing the bulk of high risk work (long line, etc.) Busy + risky = more opportunity for accidents.
If anyone had any rate based (hour normalized) statistics for the US, by make, for a recent year (modern Robinsons with modern training, not pre-SFAR 73), I'd be very interested to see them.
You probably have to put context to the aircraft type and the accident otherwise your stats are kind of irrelevant. E.g. a lot of the Bell accidents are machines doing seriously difficult work where most are the accidents are pilots flying the aircraft into the ground (e.g. Firefighting, EMS) as opposed to the aircraft themselves breaking causing the accident.