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USHST studies accident records in different helicopter sectors

U.S. Helicopter Safety Team Press Release | November 19, 2018

Estimated reading time 3 minutes, 2 seconds.

The U.S. Helicopter Safety Team has looked at 10 years of helicopter operations data from January 2009 through 2018 and compared the share of flight hours of every industry type with the percentage share of total accidents and fatal accidents.

During this period, U.S. civil helicopters flew more than 31 million flight hours and experienced 1,298 total accidents and 209 fatal accidents. Comparing the share of flight hours with the share of accidents within each industry area, the USHST developed these lists showing which industry areas have the best and worst records for total accidents and fatal accidents.

At the top of the list, air ambulance helicopters fly about 16 percent of all the industry’s hours, so it would be expected that they also would experience about 16 percent of the accidents. However, this is not the case. Only seven percent of helicopter accidents involve an air ambulance mission, resulting in a positive variance of nine points. At the bottom of the list, personal/private pilots fly only three percent of all flight hours, but they have 22 percent of the accidents. (A negative variance of 19.)

The USHST also looked at the same comparison for fatal accidents involving civil helicopters.

Although instructional flying, aerial observation and air ambulance operations have somewhat higher amounts of fatal accidents, the numbers are lower than would be expected when compared to the share of flight hours. Note that air ambulance stays in the top tier, but does fall from first to the sixth position. This may be because their missions are sometimes carried out in poor weather or in challenging landing areas where the risk of a serious accident is higher.

At the bottom of the list, with more fatal accidents than expected are commercial, aerial application, utilities/construction and personal/private flying. This stems in part because of various risk factors: low-altitude operations, the need to fly near wires, or the higher number of private helicopters with less experienced pilots.

Commercial operations, aerial application and personal/private flying are three areas that the USHST is focusing on with proposed safety enhancements in order to reduce the fatal accident rate 20 percent by 2020. The data presented here is being used by the USHST to concentrate its efforts in areas of the industry with worse-than-expected accident and fatality rates.

Since 2013, the U.S. Helicopter Safety Team has focused on enhancing safe operations and reducing fatal accidents within the U.S. civil helicopter community. From 2012 to 2014, the average number of U.S. accidents per year was 146 and the average number of fatal accidents each year was 25. From 2015 to 2017, this has decreased to 118 total accidents per year (down 19 percent) and 18 fatal accidents per year (down 28 percent).

For more details about the data, see the full press release on the USHST website.

 

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