MY 2 CENTS’ WORTH
By Randy Mains VOICE FOR THE VOICELESS
It certainly wasn’t my intention to be on drugs when I addressed FAA regulators at the “Meet the FAA Regulators” session at HAI Heli-Expo 2014. Two hours prior to that talk, I literally couldn’t walk. My back suddenly went out causing excruciating lower back pain, something that occurs every three years or so due to years of competitive tennis, and decades in the cockpit. Still, I needed to tell the regulators that they missed a real
opportunity to draft meaningful new rules to stop the unacceptable HEMS accident rate. Throwing a mix of over- the-counter painkillers down my throat, I gingerly made my way to the convention center.
I already knew the answers to any questions I might ask because I’d exhaustively researched the subject for the last two books I’d written on HEMS safety. But I wasn’t there to ask questions. Instead I was there to speak on behalf of over 700 crew members that had been involved in HEMS crashes crew members who’d perished since I became a HEMS pilot back in January 1979. Their voices had been silenced.
No one in the audience knew who I was. two-crew helicopter environment while sharing the cockpit with airline transport
8 Mar/Apr 2016
(after explaining that I was on drugs and the reason why) I gave them a little personal background. It was important they knew I had skin in the game.
I told them I was one of six early pioneers at Hermann Hospital in Houston trying to prove the HEMS concept in America. In that more HEMS crews would die if change.
“You missed a great opportunity to draft meaningful rules that would actually recommendations from the taskforce
to a recommendation made by the NTSB to the FAA that could have—by their own admission—prevented half those HEMS accidents. In a September and endorsed by the then head of the
“A review of the NTSB Aviation Accident Database revealed that during the 8-year period from 2000–2008, 123 HEMS accidents occurred, killing 104 people and seriously injuring 42 more. Pilot actions or omissions, in some capacity, were attributed as the probable cause
in 60 of the 123 accidents. Most of these 60 accidents might have been prevented had a second pilot and/or an autopilot been present.”
doesn’t have to abide by safety recommendations proposed by the
full story. Flight safety in our industry is
The NTSB does research and makes recommendations to the FAA. Then the FAA proposes rules and presents you think? In the dual-pilot/autopilot added expense could force smaller operators out of business.
research determining that the industry could have possibly prevented at least half operators elected not to pass a rule dollar value on a human life.
Imagine Congress in the early 1970s proposing their new seatbelt law to the good law because it would cost us too and more people die.
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