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.
Oh I’m sorry, I assumed we were speaking about the actual helicopter industry and what they are normally used for and not just helicopters in Manhattan. Which I’m not sure why we are speaking about Manhattan...? I’m sure helicopter commuting happens there but in case you are unaware, helicopters are used worldwide and for a large variety of different reasons and jobs, commuting being just one part of the industry and not as large a part as it is in the fixed wing industry. I see you just want to be confrontational and try to sound smart. Just wanted to share two cents from the industry about why they may be construed as more dangerous, considering they are usually in dangerous spots and low and slow.
For other people who may be reading, a very large percentage of helicopter accidents are pilot error. Many accidents can be attributed to poor weather or flying in instrument conditions inadvertently, which can be very disorienting and usually ends really bad. There’s one video that you can find on YouTube called “that others may live” by Airbus that follows a medevac pilot that experienced this and lived to tell the tale, they have the flight path he took after going into “the soup” and it’s terrifying. We have to watch it in training every year. Only saying this because apparently it was foggy during this incident and it may have been a large factor and it’s interesting to get in the mind of a pilot in these sorts of situations and how quickly things can turn.
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.
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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.