The US helicopter
industry posts its safest
record in 25 years.
DIVIDENDSafety H
The By Mark Huber
ELICOPTER FLYING ACHIEVED RECORD safety last year. And that’s no accident. In 2024, the US helicopter industry posted its lowest number of fatal accidents and its lowest
rate of fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours in 25 years. The reasons why are many. More companies offer flight
data monitoring hardware, software, and analysis to aug- ment operators’ safety management systems, and auto- pilots and stability augmentation systems are now standard equipment on various light helicopter models. Virtual- and augmented-reality simulation reduce the cost of and increase the effectiveness of training. Perhaps most import- ant, the vertical aviation community is increasingly embrac- ing a structured safety culture. At a US Helicopter Safety Team (USHST) All-Hands
Seminar presented at VERTICON 2025 in Dallas, Texas, this past March, FAA aviation safety coordinator Lee Roskop pre- sented a slew of data that, on the whole, showed improved safety performance by US helicopter operations (see “2024 Safety Stats for US Fatal Helicopter Accidents,” opposite).
58 POWER UP JUN 2025 The fatal accident rate has been steadily declining since
2020, when it was 0.79; the 2024 rate was 0.44 fatal acci- dents per 100,000 flight hours. The total count of 13 fatal accidents for the year was the lowest in the past 25 years. Roskop called the results “pretty amazing numbers.” There were only 4 fatal accidents in the first 6 months of
the year and 10 months when there were either zero or only 1 fatal accident. In 2024, from Feb. 9 to Apr. 26, no fatal acci- dents occurred; that 76-day streak was the longest period without a fatal accident since a 107-day run in 2020. The fatality rate of 1.02 per 100,000 flight hours was 24%
lower than the previous 5-year average and 17% lower than the previous 10-year average. The overall fatality count of 30 was comparable to the best years on record, 2015 and 2016, when 28 were recorded each year. Roskop noted that 20% (6) of 2024’s fatalities occurred in just 1 accident and that 6 of the 13 fatal accidents had at least 3 fatalities. The overall accident rate, including both fatal and nonfatal
events, of 2.99 per 100,000 flight hours was also the lowest in 25 years and only the third time during the period when
VAI/Dianne Bond
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