Helicopter accident rate - europe

[Phoinix]

I'm trying to find accident rates for helicopters in europe. I've read an article in rotor&wing in march, but the pie charts don't say the rate (accidents per flight hours) as it would probably show more.
I'm trying to compare commercial (airplane) or airplanes in general, accident rate to helicopter accident rate. I know its higher, but how much higher. Trend for the future from the past, where are we heading safety wise?

Any help will be appreciated as I have found almost nill on www.

Jure

[toptobottom]

Have you tried talking to Haywards? It has a lot of statistical info. on aviation incidents.

Haywards Aviation Insurance
Harling House
47/51 Great Suffolk Street
London
SE1 OBS
United Kingdom
tel: [phone]
fax: [phone]

[Encyclo]

IHST

International Helicopter Safety Team is a good place to start. Are you familiar with their efforts?

Go to Home

Hope this helps

[Mel Effluent]

The EASA Annual Safety Review contains lots of useful data. See here:

Safety & Research | Annual Safety Review

For some reason, the most recent version is for 2008, but it should give you what you need.

[Phoinix]

Thank you all. I'll take some time to get through all the information and get back to you with information.

Jure

[heli1]

HELICOPTER International has recorded all accidents since about 1977 in a regular bimonthly update if you can get hold of back copies

[The Night Owl]

Griffin Helicopters | Accident Database

this site is useful, not the gospel truth though.. some accidents slip the net

[ppheli]

HeliHub.com records many more accidents and incidents than Griffin or ASN, and you can click on the tags to filter their output. Start here. Helicopter International edits what they include as they are limited on space.

[VeeAny]

Griffin Accident Database

this site is useful, not the gospel truth though.. some accidents slip the net

You will find that until last weekend [19 June 2010] I had managed to do no accident updates at all this year to the Griffin site, I have been too busy and the automated process was on a machine that failed in January, it got rebuilt on Saturday.

I have some help starting in July who will be filtering the media reports when time permits to give us a fighting chance of picking up most of the newer ones and putting some more recent historical data into the database.

I also plan to allow people to submit accidents for consideration which once confirmed will be added to the accident database.

None of these sites will ever be perfect, and getting accurate accident rate data will never be possible until we (as an industry) have a way to track how many hours a year our particular types actually fly, we can estimate it, but even in the UK which has a reasonably high helicopter population the data is nowhere near good enough to produce accurate stats from I am afraid, even if we knew about every incident. It might be possible to do for a subset like the the offshore industry where the big 3 operators could probably tally quite quickly the hours flown on a type in a period, but that doesn't cover everything.

We will never know about every incident as some are clearly covered up and never make it near an MOR or the AAIB.

[heli1]

PPheli.....I don't believe Helicopter International does edit the number of accident entries ,only the synopsis.Of course the data gathering has improved over the years so I notice it now sometimes fills two pages ,presumably to keep up!