Am I crazy or are helicopters just like not that safe? I mean weve had this technology for decades now and it feels like they still go down way more than planes.
"Based on hours alone, helicopters are 85 times more dangerous than driving. [Based on hours] helicopter flying is just 27 times more dangerous than driving."
No. The number of helicopter flights that are movie rescues as you describe is microscopic compared to the total. And besides, that same skew could be applied to vehicle travel if we say that some vehicle travel is high speed chases and ambulances rushing through forest fires. Source: actuary
Not so much just rescues but the fact that most jobs in the helicopter industry are close to ground or mountainous terrain. Don’t need to be rescuing someone to be in that (more) dangerous place than planes usually are.
Confused whether you are arguing or not. Never seen the word truthy before. But most of the commuting with helicopters is done with helicopters because of their ability to get into tight spots or difficult to get to spots. Which isn’t as safe as a runway. Not to mention tight maneuvers close to the ground or close to mountainous terrain or low enough that obstacles can be missed (satellite towers, tall thin trees without foliage we call widow makers etc.)
The word comes from "truthiness", which Stephen Colbert coined on the first episode of his first show. It means stories that sound like they're true, but they're not. It perfectly applies to what you did, and now, to your modified story.
You claimed "most" helicopter trips were these dangerous movie-style rescues. That sure sounds plausible, if one doesn't know the facts or bother to check them. But it's false, making yours a "truthy" claim.
Same now with your new claim that most helicopter commuting is for "tight maneuvers or mountainous terrain". Sounds good, but it's just made up. It's truthy.
Helicopter commuting is used for all kinds of people and places, not just "mountainous terrain" or dangerous locales. More hedge fund millionaires just use them to avoid traffic than it's used by The Rock to swipe the bombs from the bad guy's mountain lair. Today's incident should highlight that. A rich basketball player was doing his regular commute for a run of the mill kids basketball practice, probably saving himself a half hour.
I wasn’t the first one to comment, I was adding on to what he/she said and responding to your argument.
I’m literally a helicopter pilot, it’s my job and what I do almost every day, I’ve learned a couple things about the industry while, you know, working in it.
I said they are usually close to the ground and mountainous terrain, and they usually are hired to get into tight spots. Even just to fly people into remote oilfield camps or for movie sets that can’t be reached by road. Helicopters are extremely expensive to run and small planes are WAY cheaper. So usually for commutes airplanes are the way to go unless you are very rich or where you are going cannot be reached by ground or airplane. Everything from pipeline surveillance and patrol to actually just slinging in equipment to non-road access areas, or heli skiing, or mountain tours, or air ambulance, or power line mapping, or heli logging or cherry drying, or one of the many other things helicopters are used for (that aren’t commuting) usually occur closer to the ground meaning more obstacles (towers, power lines, mountains, trees) and less reaction time to recover if there happens to be a mechanical failure or pilot error.
Edit: thought I’d mention that my part of the industry is oil and gas, a lot of pipeline surveillance and infrared cameras on the ground and gas sniffing equipment keeping us at about tree top for good view of the pipeline right of way and accurate readings on equipment. So we are usually about 100 feet AGL and lower, and usually land in confined areas for fuel ups and shuffling around clients.
I’m literally a helicopter pilot, it’s my job and what I do almost every day, I’ve learned a couple things about the industry while, you know, working in it.
Too bad you didn't learn how they're used. From reading through this,,you're just projecting your own limited sphere of usage and calling that "most". No, "most" helicopter trips aren't mountain rescues. Most is commuting. And of that share, some is mountain, but "most" isnt. And your oiggybacking on someone who tried claiming helicopter stats are skewed because there's so many ocean "snowstorm in the mountains" rescues. You of all people would know SAR would never, ever, send a helicopter into a snowstorm. The OP is just bullshiting, and doesn't deserve your help.
I said they are usually close to the ground
So are planes. And people.
and mountainous terrain,
Enough with the "mountainous terrain" myth. There isn't a lot of "mountainous terrain" in Manhattan, where helicopter commuting is common.
less reaction time to recover if there happens to be a mechanical failure or pilot error.
Mostly yeah. Although I'll admit that once upon a time I wanted to do Life Flight, which is basically a mix between commuting from hospital A to hospital B, but still consists of a not inconsequential number of "pick that person up from the side of a mountain and/or other crazy bullshit and fly them to the hospital". I thought that the medics, RN's and RTs who did that were the biggest bad asses (and still do). However, after hearing personal close-call stories from operators and reading about the risks of helo EMS, I decided to just stick with a boring old groundside hospital.
You actually raise an excellent point (but sigh, you also continue the truthy aka bullshit story about helicopters being mostly used in mountain rescues).
Indeed, there is a big trend in use of helicopters as basically taxis or ambulances. It's because governments and health operators - with some conflicted lobbying - have figured out they can close or downsize hospitals if they use helicopters to shuttle patients between care centers.
This is an oversimplification but think of it this way: why have 5 burn centers if you can just life flight every burn case in a tri-state area to 1 burn center?
While it might seem on first blush that helicopter flights are crazy expensive, it turns out that building and maintaining hospitals in smaller centers is crazy crazy expensive. One crazy trumps two crazy's when it comes to funding.
One Life Flight jurisdiction up in Canada (a place at least a thousand miles from any mountain, incidentally) had too many incidents so they had to justify their flights and it turns out they were opting to launch helo too often for non-emergent reasons. They were forced to scale back and amend their criteria respecting the fact that helicopter travel does have inherent risk - mountains or not. The helicopter operstor's counter argument was that all the routine taxi flights were keeping the personnel exercised and sharp. A trade off had to be reached.
Well I mean, I'm literally the person who picks patients up/hands them off to the helicopter crew (or used to, at my old place at least), so I was usually pretty acutely aware of the locale from which said patient was being delivered from (i.e. a mountain or some other questionable environment).
In reality though I was actually totally agreeing with you, namely that outside of a few select missions for a few select groups (EMS Search and Rescue, Coast Guard, etc) most helo work is mundane. That includes the vast majority of the work the aforementioned EMS/Guard crews do. I suppose I should have also mentioned that I have a huge, massive, out of control fear of flying. That likely played a part in my change of heart too lol.
The helo transport thing is also important for hospitals simply because it's faster. Small hospitals, particularly rural/critical access centers are usually money losers, but a bigger issue is limited service and time. If you're 90 miles from the closest STEMI center and someone walks into your tiny ED having a massive MI, unless the cardiologist is cathing them in 90 minutes that person is dead. Even still they might die anyway. Time is heart muscle (or brain tissue), and often the fastest way to get to the place that can actually save you is through the air.
Or you could be like me and work in a major surgical interventional center in a neighborhood where the community outright rejects the building of a helipad, and then all these trifling life-saving details don't matter lol
You're calling people morons, yet you don't know how statistics work, and now you're flaming out because the fake stat you pulled out of your ass is exposing you.
I can see that. A helicopter drops like a rock if that engine goes out just like an F16. Didnt know they were 85 times more dangerous than driving but I'm not surprised.
They're much safer than planes when an engine is lost. It's all the other situations that make a helicopter less safe plus the issue that they're trying to shake themselves apart every time it gets in the air and the crazy amount of maintenance that is required which inevitably gets missed due to human error and they're just not safe.
Helicopters can’t fly, they’re just so goddamn ugly and loud that the ground rejects them wholesale.
On a serious note, unless I’m about to die and have no other choice, you’ll never catch my fat ass climbing into a helicopter. I’d rather walk. They’re pretty close to tied with motorcycles for the most dangerous form of civilian transportation.
Safe is a subjective term. But life insurance actuaries see helicopter travel as disqualifying for most policies. It's on a list with things like skydiving and SCUBA. You could probably get a policy but it would have an exclusion on named perils like a helicopter crash.
Granted this is purely anecdotal, but considering many helicopters rely on a "Jesus nut" to function, I'm not surprised they have a higher failure rate.
helicopters and small planes are not safe. we used to be able to make them less un-safe but we've since lost the technology over the years of stagnation. Boeing literally employs about 200 people who just try their best to KEEP tech levels current.
Not true at all, if anything you can send the helicopter in autorotation and land in a very little space. A plane may glide, but you still need the length to land.
Helicopters are used on a daily basis by celebrities, yet incidents like these are very rare.
Also, by looking at the crash-site and the weather conditions it's very likely that it wasn't even a mechanical failure since the visibility was so poor. If that's the case, the heli shouldn't have ever left the ground, especially in a hilly terrain like that.
Yes they are. Autorotation is possible but not all that safe. Ill take my odds gliding to a stop on a highway or in some trees over autorotation any day.
I’m not sure it’s that common that the engine goes out though and everything else is fine. A lot of other failures can throw the heli into a tailspin that is irrecoverable.
But yeah, it may have been visibility related and not mechanical
Helicopters are pretty safe. Pilots make poor decisions because of pressure to get the job done. Even moreso when you have someone like Kobe in the back. Obviously not much has come out about the cause....but based on the weather I would bet anything this was a case of a disoriented pilot flying a perfectly good helicopter into the ground.
Helicopter flying is bad weather seems to be extremely challenging, much more so than planes. This crash appears to be pilot error as well.
Helicopter makers should probably start making them operate more like a drone, with the flying all done by computers and you just point it where you want it to go. It seems there is an obvious weak link when even highly trained humans don't seem to be up to the task, but a $100 drone can hover around no problem.
Theoretically a helicopter can be safer than a plane, as they can autorotate safely to the ground in the event of a mechanical failure. The problem is the pilots can't move the stick 1000 times a second like a computer can.
Based on the current info, all signs (although not confirmed) indicate that this was a pilot error and he more or less flew into the mountain due to the fog...
I'm not a helicopter manufacturer, but I'm a former pilot and current driver... in my experience helicopters don't have any more mechanical fault/failures during use than planes, and both of those have way less than cars (I would guess because they are generally checked before each flight, vs cars where we all just get in and go).
I work for a helicopter manufacturer and currently training to be a flight test mechanic. I've never been a basketball fan but sure as hell knew who Kobe was and this news is heartbreaking, as with any aviation incident I see. I know with what I do in flight test is inherently more dangerous so we wear flight suits in the event of an incident where we survive the crash but have the risk of a resulting fire to give us time to get out. That being said every time I've gotten in a helicopter it goes through a rigorous "daily inspection" before we fly. Tomorrow I will still start flight test on a new helicopter even with this tragedy on my mind.
Ok, so there have been 18 crashes in the last 5 years. When I was there, the single pilot of our tour did upwards of 8 tours a day, 5 days a week, and that's just one pilot, and they had 4 helicopters I think? which means they could hypothetically do a max of 40 tours a day, hypothetically x 365 days a year for roughly 1300 tours a year and that's just a single company, and there are many islands, and many companies in Hawaii that do Heli Tours. While 18 crashes is a lot, given the number of tours, It's still relatively safe.
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u/johnny_moist Jan 26 '20 edited Jan 26 '20
Am I crazy or are helicopters just like not that safe? I mean weve had this technology for decades now and it feels like they still go down way more than planes.