Word: crashes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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These troubles are not new. The National Transportation Safety Board first investigated the medical-helicopter industry's crash epidemic in 1988. It found that low visibility, often caused by bad weather, accounted for 61% of all crashes. "Weather-related accidents are the most common and the most serious type of accident experienced by EMS helicopters," the report found, "and are also the most easily prevented...
However, not much prevention has happened since 1988. Variations on a simple chain reaction - where pilots fly without instruments in low visibility or at night, lose their bearings or make bad decisions, and crash into terrain - caused 80% of all helicopter-ambulance accidents reviewed by the Congressional Research Service in 2006. "The same accidents keep happening over and over," says Stacey Friedman, founder of Safemedflight.org, which advocates for crash victims' families. Her sister Erin Reed was a nurse who died in a medical-helicopter crash in Puget Sound...
...pictures of the plane crash in the Hudson River...
...meantime, some EMS chopper companies are deciding to spend lots of money to prevent what they believe is a common cause of many accidents. Air Methods Corp. of Englewood, Colorado operates 335 aircraft, the largest medical helicopter fleet in the U.S. Last year, the company experienced two fatal crashes in two months. The first accident, in May 2008, may fit the industry's crash profile. The helicopter went down on a night flight to the airport in Madison, Wisconsin, possibly as it encountered rain and fog, according to the transportation safety board's initial report. Three crew members died...
...June, an Air Methods helicopter crashed into another chopper in mid-air on a sunny day over Flagstaff, Arizona, killing seven. Even though the second crash did not fit the pattern, pilots experiencing emergencies when they hit low visibility - which is called "unplanned transition to Instrument Flight Rules" in industry parlance - "is a common theme," says Brian Foster, Air Methods' director of operations...