Those two documents then led to the quite-detailed last document: HAI Decision-Making and IIMC. Here, we go through the whole process of planning your flight and making the right decisions during the flight so you can avoid IIMC—because everything really is about avoidance and not getting anywhere near an IIMC event. I can’t stress that enough: IIMC recovery skills must be taught, but I’d be quite happy if pilots made such good decisions that they never had to use them. However, we do recognize that there are going to be some operations where the risk of flying inadvertently into the clouds is higher. So we also address in the paper the whole process of how you effect the recovery from IIMC back to VMC.
Are these resources aimed at a particular audience? Becker: I hope people understand this is not a one-size- fits-all solution. IIMC is a really complex issue, and it doesn’t have any one answer. We all fly different types of helicopters and different types of operations, in differ- ent operational contexts and in different environments. But what we can do consistently across the board is conduct the basic training in how we plan and prepare, how we make decisions during a flight, and how we recover from an IIMC event. In these documents, I hope people find some real meat and potatoes, if you like, on how to do all those things within their operational context.
Boughton: I also would like to point out that in these documents, there’s something for everyone. When I first looked at the drafts, I realized I’d never really thought about some of these things the way they’re outlined in the papers, and I’ve been flying for almost 22 years. While what’s in these papers is valuable to new pilots, there’s some in-depth information even the most experienced pilots among us would do well to review. Pilots are always learning, and if you’re not, you need to question what you’re doing. But after you’ve been out there making money with your aircraft for a number of years, it’s easy to get lulled into a false sense of security. There are some really basic things that people just stop thinking about after a certain point in their career, and that’s a good time for everyone to go back to basics. It’s one thing to tell someone the prescriptive minimum, but how do you really know the distance to that cloud? These documents give pilots really good tools to do that.
Learn to Avoid— or Survive— IIMC
EVERY PILOT LEARNS that IIMC is one of the top causes of fatal acci- dents. Yet, helicopter pilots still find themselves unintentionally in the clouds … with, on average, only 56 seconds to live.
Operators, pilots, trainers, and safety professionals throughout the international helicopter community are urged to take advantage of
these resources: ■ HAI VFR Best Practices: provides recommended standards for maintaining helicopter flight safety under visual flight rules
■ HAI Estimating Distance: supplies pilots with the tools to make informed judgments about distance and closure rates in order to maintain a minimum distance from clouds
■ HAI Decision-Making and IIMC: covers the preparations required to avoid IMC, airborne decision-making, and recommended recovery procedures in the event that IMC is unavoidable. These training materials, written by helicopter pilots for helicopter pilots, are available for FREE on the HAI website at
rotor.org/education. Find more IIMC resources at
ushst.org/56secs.
How can we get the most out of these resources? Becker: In the first place, people should just read them, in order, for context, beginning with VFR Best Practices, then Estimating Distance, and finally, Decision-Making and IIMC. Knowledge is power. You may not yet neces- sarily know how to apply that knowledge, but you’re tak- ing some of that knowledge on board. Next, these reference materials should become the basis of a 10-hour basic instrument course. I would pre- fer it to be part of a commercial rating course so that 10 hours of required instrument training is really targeted at all the issues we’ve discussed: planning and knowing how to stay in VMC, making good decisions to avoid IMC, and if necessary, recovering from IIMC. I also hope operators choose to use these reference materials in their own internal training and procedures. So whatever role you have in the industry—pilot, opera- tor, trainer—please download these papers, read them, and use them.
DECEMBER 2021 ROTOR 23
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