Another HEMS crash

Flyinhigh728 said:
It is a requirement for any HEMS job, including VFR only, to have an instrument rating. Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of companies provide the bare minimum of training each year, so it seems impossible to remain proficient.
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Well that's a problem. It's 2015, it's been 86 years since Jimmy Doolittle did his blind flying experiment, and your iPhone can function as an AHRS and GPS. I don't know how to do it, but time to put the screws to operators about joining the 21st century. Alternatively, like it said earlier, just accept that losing a helo every six months or so is a cost of doing business.
 
I knew Matt (the pilot that was killed) from Facebook. He was the guy that bought my Apache sight unseen and didn't have a fixed wing ME rating yet. He got it to build time and to possibly pursue a fixed wing career. He was still in the Army then as a CH-47 pilot. Later, he separated from the Army and got a job flying Medevac. Matt posted a lot on Facebook and it was fun reading his stuff. I'd often comment whenever he talked about the Apache and was surprised he didn't hate me after buying the plane. It was out of annual and needed a lot of TLC (he got a good deal on it, though). I'm sorry to hear of Matt's passing. I know he had a son who is a teenager. Very sad.
 
MikeD said:
Alot of the mitigation starts with the launch decision in the first place, versus getting airborne and dealing with dicey conditions then. Seems basic, I know, but that's where alot of the issues with HEMS operations appear to be the most prevelant.



I think offsite landing issues are moreso an insurance thing with regards to risk, however the risk is there, especially with brown/whiteout landing conditions that can be encountered with little notice, and which have bitten many a helo pilot. Risk vs reward, a HEMS bird that is transport-only, and isn't doing rescue, there's no real need to land offsite. Survivable or not (dynamic rollover personal survivability has alot of luck factored in, as you're just along for the ride and any host of things can go wrong, since its a crash) the loss of equipment itself, as well as crews, doesn't justify the need.

Hover hold equipment does exist, but may not necessarilyhelp in a cruise flight IMC inadverent penetration. Autopilot would be better, but since these aren't IFR birds anyway (these single-pilot ones such as AS350), no one is pushing down the doors to install one. Training remains the best option, in my opinion, over equipment. If equipment can be acquired or afforded, then that would be an immediate second.



I haven't seen it used for other than you describe; mission decline. And I face the same thing out here: west of KRYN, I have no WX reporting stations at night until KYUM nearly 180 miles west. Daytime, KGXF (halfway between the two) has hourly METAR, but no TAF. But still, that's 90 or so mile areas with no WX reporting coverage. And I've been bitten a good few times at night by that.
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Thanks for the thoughtful response MikeD. What you said makes a lot of sense.
 
Boris Badenov said:
The Yuropeeins have all of those things in EC145s. I mean, they also don't have 15 helicopters parked within a 50 mile radius of every major metropolitan area, with a lot of programs doing a couple of flights a week, so it's "affordable"er. Let's face it, much like everything else in our totally, barking-at-cars, hugging-yourself insane medical system, the economics of HEMS are broken...the rest follows.

The HEMS tool was pretty much crap, as far as I could tell, but I obviously didn't pay as close attention as the rotor guys. The certainly never relied on it to make a "go" decision, and seemed to treat it with a healthy amount of skepticism for a "no-go", as well.

As to sounding like a big nancy...yeah probably to some extent true. With that said, and with the proviso that this is obviously purely anecdotal, I did EMS for a little over 2 1/2 years. The guy who crashed next to SLU was the second guy I had met in that time who got dead flying HEMS. By contrast, I flew night freight in scary airplanes with supposedly dodgy maintenance and all the other hairy-chestery for ~6 years, and to the best of my knowledge, no one I knew ever died (or even got hurt) doing it. There's the perception of danger, and then there's, well, danger.
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I'm not sure the Airbus :cool: 145 is the answer. In talking with the guys here who fly it, you're struggling with weight SPIFR when you need an alternate. Forget about a second.
 
deadstick said:
I'm not sure the Airbus :cool: 145 is the answer. In talking with the guys here who fly it, you're struggling with weight SPIFR when you need an alternate. Forget about a second.
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Back in the day when hospital-based systems were more common, where the hospital owned the iron, you saw far more A109/S76/BK-117/BO-105 helos in use, the last two of those being exceptionally common at one time. Great birds, but high cost to operate. When many hospitals shed their own programs due to cost/liability/etc, thats when you started seeing far more of the AS350/B206/B407s being around far more, although the 206 had been doing EMS for a long time. Lighter, cheaper, single-engine, lower cost.
 
To give AEL a bit of credit, they are spending a bunch of cash to upgrade the avionics in the VFR L-models to include a basic autopilot.

The only aside from the whole crew dying, one thing that would have made this worse would have been a BS transfer. There are just way too many of those. I believe they lifted a kid who had been hit by an SUV.
 
deadstick said:
To give AEL a bit of credit, they are spending a bunch of cash to upgrade the avionics in the VFR L-models to include a basic autopilot.

The only aside from the whole crew dying, one thing that would have made this worse would have been a BS transfer. There are just way too many of those. I believe they lifted a kid who had been hit by an SUV.
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Unfortunately it's sort of hard to say what is and isn't BS in alot of (rural) places. For example, alot of the small towns up here only have one ambulance, so running a patient 100 miles away is just not an option, and a doctor might not be readily available at the local facility to treat the patient. On the medical side, it's bad juju to turn down a patient because you "think it's a BS transfer" because then one day the facility will get a patient that legitimately needs to be sent out, but will be either A- Too gunshy to make the call and therefore the patient doesn't receive an adequate level of care, or B- The facility calls another service, and you go out of business.
 
My company ran Bell 222's back when it was the only show in town. Then the 206's started popping up on every street corner, so there went the ability to run the big ships. Downgraded to AS350B3's and EC130's. They are nicely equipped for what they are (helisas, glass panel, synthetic vision, a/c, etc..) but they aren't a 222 or 430 etc..And while the 206 is a great machine, I definately think it's being pushed to the absolute limit doing ems work with it.
I do think the helicopters are "misused" pretty regularly by EMS and hospitals, but I think it will be on the insurance companies to put it a stop to it. I have made several flights where the patient could've already been at the receiving by the time it took us to even get to the referring.
I'm going to finish up the 15 more hrs multi I need and start dropping apps with airlines, and see where it goes. I don't see the hems industry changing any time soon.

Also, keep the folks in Belgrade in your thoughts. They had one go down today as well. Been an absolute HORRIBLE week for aviation...
 
Roger Roger said:
Well that's a problem. It's 2015, it's been 86 years since Jimmy Doolittle did his blind flying experiment, and your iPhone can function as an AHRS and GPS. I don't know how to do it, but time to put the screws to operators about joining the 21st century. Alternatively, like it said earlier, just accept that losing a helo every six months or so is a cost of doing business.
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It's not every 6 months, it's way closer to 1-2 per month.
 
Flyinhigh728 said:
Out of curiosity, how do the SPIFR programs go about doing scene landings? Or are IFR operations only for hospital to hospital transfers?
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Not just hosp to hosp, they can depart IFR if the on-scene LZ is VMC, then they return to hosp or airport IFR. They can also do transfer from hosp/hosp, airport/airport, etc.
SOME program have their own IFR routes that are not a part of the "normal" route system, also approaches to hosp, and point-in-space approaches. One nice thing is the ability to point-in-space to one hosp, break out and land at a different hosp.

We could learn a LOT from the Canadian HEMS program. GREAT network of LZs and a solid IFR structure for these missions.
 
deadstick said:
I am sooooo tired of this crap. I know that is not what I originally typed.
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I was picturing the crew, possibly on fire, sort of turning their heads conspiratorially to the camera and mouthing your post. I know, I know, WAY too soon. But in a no-joke serious business you have to be quick to laugh, don't you?
 
As to rotor matters, I am as usual speaking out of my depth, but it seems to me that some indefinite barrier has been passed. It's gone from "yeah, that's a poop-dangerous job and thanks for doing it" to "WTF, there has to be a better way". I don't know enough to say that putting another pilot-person up there or having an autopilot or IFR recurrent or whatever is the solution...that's for you whirlygiggers to work out amongst yourselves. But I guess I've gotten to the point that I'm tired of seeing all of my former co-workers' facebook profile pictures being the old "black armband Nevar Forget" etc etc. I can't off the top of my head think of a more dangerous job, up to and including knocking down trees in Alaska with a crew of hard-drinking submorons. Follow the money.
 
Boris Badenov said:
The Yuropeeins have all of those things in EC145s. I mean, they also don't have 15 helicopters parked within a 50 mile radius of every major metropolitan area, with a lot of programs doing a couple of flights a week, so it's "affordable"er. Let's face it, much like everything else in our totally, barking-at-cars, hugging-yourself insane medical system, the economics of HEMS are broken...the rest follows.

The HEMS tool was pretty much crap, as far as I could tell, but I obviously didn't pay as close attention as the rotor guys. The certainly never relied on it to make a "go" decision, and seemed to treat it with a healthy amount of skepticism for a "no-go", as well.

As to sounding like a big nancy...yeah probably to some extent true. With that said, and with the proviso that this is obviously purely anecdotal, I did EMS for a little over 2 1/2 years. The guy who crashed next to SLU was the second guy I had met in that time who got dead flying HEMS. By contrast, I flew night freight in scary airplanes with supposedly dodgy maintenance and all the other hairy-chestery for ~6 years, and to the best of my knowledge, no one I knew ever died (or even got hurt) doing it. There's the perception of danger, and then there's, well, danger.
Click to expand...

I visited with a HEMS group in England a few weeks ago. Their operation was very interesting and radically different to anything in the US. Entirely funded by charity, no night flying (and no lighted helipads at the hospitals they visit), 15 minute flights, all of which are scene flights, it's a completely different dynamic when 15 companies aren't competing for the IHS dollar.
 
I was going to point out that another crash had happened about the time that this one did that I didn't see here, but I see Boris mentioned it. So much room for improvement its disgusting even on the ATC side of things. We have the ability to call up hospitals on our scopes, but if they aren't included and the pilot hasn't flown there before, I'm not really much help. Here we just got a new procedure for a GPS based instrument approach/let down that could serve two hospitals. That's been brought up here and its about time. Our problems locally are the hospital it was built for has undergone 4 different name changes and I don't have the first clue as to where the fixes are or plates are located. I don't know what the NAV technology is in the HEMS world, but I've found myself at times scrounging to help a pilot recognize the LZ to manage energy and drop off a patient ASAP. At times its been me recounting landmarks from my drive home and at others its been grabbing a trainee whose wife works at A hospital and you're playing 20 questions. So anyone know what Mike's home health clinic is called now? Oh I see. It got bought out by regional health services in 1972, great start.
 
But why should we be bothering with GPS approaches in WX to some hospital helipad? Or picking up VMC until we can get an IFR clearance to get to X destination for some IFR letdown?

Isn't this just more ways of trying to find "workarounds" to the problem, instead of saying "sorry, this mission is a no-go."

At some point, sorry, the helo is just not available. Too much risk, for the reward. Sorry there's a patient somewhere in an MVA on a road, or in need of critical interfacility. But too risky to take the helo.

When we start getting into these whiz-bang methods of managing flying IFR on these flights, then to me, the mission was likely a cancel a long time ago for a helicopter.
 
Boris Badenov said:
As to rotor matters, I am as usual speaking out of my depth, but it seems to me that some indefinite barrier has been passed. It's gone from "yeah, that's a poop-dangerous job and thanks for doing it" to "WTF, there has to be a better way". I don't know enough to say that putting another pilot-person up there or having an autopilot or IFR recurrent or whatever is the solution...that's for you whirlygiggers to work out amongst yourselves. But I guess I've gotten to the point that I'm tired of seeing all of my former co-workers' facebook profile pictures being the old "black armband Nevar Forget" etc etc. I can't off the top of my head think of a more dangerous job, up to and including knocking down trees in Alaska with a crew of hard-drinking submorons. Follow the money.
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Delete Facebook. Problem solved.

Seriously, though, even if it's a HEMS flight, at the most basic level, it's a Part 135, on-demand passenger operation. Period. I agree IIMC training has to occur more than once a year. On top of this, there has to be a corporate culture that going IIMC isn't automatically a firing offense. Maybe the FAA needs to get onboard, too? There's a 135 ASAP-like program out there that started a couple of years ago. Maybe IIMC events could be woven into that? After all that, cut/paste my previous post about black holes and dispatch/flight following.
 
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deadstick said:
Delete Facebook. Problem solved.

Seriously, though, even if it's a HEMS flight, at the most basic level, it's a Part 135, on-demand passenger operation. Period. I agree IIMC training has to occur more than once a year. On top of this, there has to be a corporate culture that going IIMC isn't automatically a firing offense. Maybe the FAA needs to get onboard, too? There's a 135 ASAP-like program out there that started a couple of years ago. Maybe IIMC events could be woven into that? After all that, cut/paste my previous post about black holes and dispatch/flight following.
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Ya, you can have ASAP under 135. Most places don't want it because ultimately it means actually fixing things.
 
NickH said:
I visited with a HEMS group in England a few weeks ago. Their operation was very interesting and radically different to anything in the US. Entirely funded by charity, no night flying (and no lighted helipads at the hospitals they visit), 15 minute flights, all of which are scene flights, it's a completely different dynamic when 15 companies aren't competing for the IHS dollar.
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The British model will not work in the US and I do not believe for a second it has the same life saving impact that the US model does. I think you will find very few truly lifesaving flights, and many patients with basic orthopedic injuries on the claim the road is too bumpy. It sounds like recruitment for a horse rider, or cyclist to do some 3rd party fundraising. Also the parents company Bond Helicopter is for profit.
 
z987k said:
Ya, you can have ASAP under 135. Most places don't want it because ultimately it means actually fixing things.
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The other thing is to properly administer and benefit from an ASAP program takes people who dedicate their time to doing the program, which at your typical 135 where the DO and CP fly 700 hours a year and the safety officer is a line pilot who does a little paperwork on occasion just doesn't work.
 
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