INTHESPOTLIGHT By Jen Boyer


HAI Training Working Group Members


Mike Becker and Scott Boughton It’s not enough to tell pilots to avoid IIMC; let’s tell them HOW.


FTER THE HIGHLY PUBLICIZED CALABASAS accident in January 2020, the HAI Training Working Group focused its attention on what could be done to reduce or eliminate accidents due to inadvertent entry into instrument meteorological condi- tions (IIMC). The working group quickly discovered that no single


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change would eliminate these accidents. But they agreed that training should be part of the solution. When pilots know the danger posed by flying into the clouds—and yet they still continue to do so—then awareness isn’t the issue. They need better training in how to avoid making that often-fatal mistake. Training Working Group members first decided to perform a comprehensive review of how IIMC avoidance is


Mike Becker Scott Boughton


taught. They then developed materials that would fill in some knowledge gaps for pilots. The result: a series of white papers (see the box on p. 23) that lays the groundwork for new curriculum worldwide that will address the short- comings in today’s IIMC avoidance training. ROTOR spoke with two members of the HAI Training Working Group about the project: Mike Becker, executive director of Becker Helicopter Services, and Scott Boughton, owner of Palisade Aviation.


How did this IIMC initiative get started? Becker: When the HAI Training Working Group started looking at what got people into IIMC, we noticed people tend to focus on one little piece of the puzzle: the pilot needed more instrument currency or needed an instru- ment rating. The politicians were saying you must have terrain-avoidance technology. We decided to look at it holistically, because there’s not any one thing that causes the problem, that leads pilots to think they have the ability to push a limit that far. We started by looking at what pilots are trained to do


now. We looked at what the visual meteorological condi- tions (VMC) rule sets were—not just in the FAA but at the European Union Aviation Safety Agency and Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority. We also looked at how each country folded the ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization] recommendations into their rule set. It was quite interesting to discover there were differences. We decided, first off, that HAI should recommend what a standard visual flight rules (VFR) set and what


22 ROTOR DECEMBER 2021


minimum VMC should look like in each airspace. We came up with a 13-page document called HAI


VFR Best Practices. It’s not law. It’s not a rule. It’s a rec- ommendation that encompasses those best practices for flying in VMC that we plucked from various countries. If you abide by these recommended best practices and apply the rules correctly, you should not get yourself into an IIMC event. Now, this document required us to write some pre-


scriptive minimums—we give a distance, a height, and a visibility. Looking at it holistically, we then looked at how a pilot interprets a prescriptive minimum. What does that look like in real life in flight? When the helicopter is flying 100 miles an hour at 500 ft. above the ground in deterio- rating weather, how do you know you are 1 mile from the cloud when it’s constantly changing? So that led to our second document, HAI Estimating


Distance. This paper offers hints, tips, and all the little tricks that experienced pilots have learned over the years on how to accurately measure a distance. Pilots can use this resource to enhance their ability to stay in VMC.


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