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...Tuesday, Sumwalt will lead four days of hearings in Washington into the medical-helicopter industry, the longest inquiry in the board's history. The hearings will be the title fight in a long-simmering argument over medical-helicopter crashes and how to prevent them. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which has sole power to regulate helicopter flight, and the Association of Air Medical Services, the industry's main trade group, maintain that most accidents have nothing in common, making it difficult for the FAA to impose tough safety rules. "Each accident has a different set of facts that leads...
Even though they fly in more challenging conditions, medical-helicopter pilots are not required by the FAA to be trained to fly using only their instruments. In any case, most helicopters lack the necessary technology. So when a helicopter pilot flies into a cloud and can't see out his windows, it is - by definition - an emergency. The pilot must simultaneously descend until he can see lights on the ground, toggle multiple radio frequencies to inform nearby planes and airports that he is flying blind, maintain control of a twitchy aircraft in conditions he is not trained to handle, over...
...three passengers still died. Many aviation-safety experts believe such crashes do follow a pattern, one that looks a lot like Kirby's last flight: pilots launch in flyable conditions, only to be confronted midflight by unexpected foul weather, darkness and terrain that they are unequipped to handle. "The FAA says they need to study the situation some more," says Vernon Albert, one of the industry's top safety experts. "That's garbage. They need to get off their butts." (See a story about surviving disasters...
Some regulators and industry leaders believe this is an oversimplification. As the FAA's Gilligan points out, a number of EMS programs that fly beefy, dual-pilot helicopters with sophisticated safety technologies have crashed, while other programs flying small, single-pilot helicopters with nothing more advanced than radio altimeters have perfect safety records. "When we introduce new technology, we want to solve the problem," Gilligan says. "But we have to be very careful not to introduce new risks...
...addition to studying computer simulations of water landings, airline pilots also undergo training in flight simulators, according to Laura Brown, a spokesperson for the FAA. (They don't practice water landings in real planes for obvious reasons.) Most modern planes have controls that allow a pilot to close all air vents and openings in the plane to keep the aircraft buoyant in the water. Pilots are instructed to keep the nose up slightly, but not so much that the aircraft slams down roughly on contact. They also are supposed to keep the wings level to prevent one from being clipped...