Flight Safety Foundation to research helicopter emergency services safety

By David Learmount

The accident rate among US helicopter emergency medical services (HEMS) operators has been so consistently bad for so many years that the Flight Safety Foundation is planning a research programme to discover its underlying causes.

FSF president and chief executive Bill Voss says the research will be the first project enabled by a gift recently made to the foundation that has enabled it to set up a research chair. Manuel Maciel, owner of fixed-base operator Manny's Somoma Aviation, has presented the FSF with $1 million. Voss says part will be used for HEMS safety research, but most will enable the FSF to endow a chair for aviation safety research in Maciel's name.

Voss says Maciel specifically asked for the money to be used for research, and explains why HEMS safety is going to be studied first: "We were aware of the serious problems associated with HEMS in the USA and were already looking for ways to take some of the safety approaches that other aviation segments had used, and apply them to this problem.

"It was clear that there was a serious lack of data available to understand HEMS accidents, and nothing out there to predict accidents or incidents. Many manufacturers recognised this weakness and were rushing to provide some sort of flight operations quality assurance capability. We saw this as an opportunity to do some very focused research work that would help us establish the precursor events and exceedences that would apply to HEMS operations."

© Reed Business Information 2009