ACCIDENT RECOVERY continued
rapidly, potentially creating the impression that the controls have jammed. On helicopters like the AS350 with clockwise-turning main rotors, “it results in a right and aft cyclic motion accompanied by down collective movement.” The amount of feedback is proportional to the sever-
It should
go without saying: the purpose
of satellite tracking is to guarantee immediate response when an
aircraft can’t be accounted for.
ity of the maneuver that instigates it, but it “normally lasts less than 2 seconds when the pilot is aware of the conditions and relaxes the pressure on the con- trols”—not the most natural reaction to a mountain ridge rushing toward you at 250 feet per second. The paramedic’s impression of the flight’s final seconds was “Hard right. Lost altitude fast. See it coming. Then we just hit …”
Search and Rescue The helicopter’s emergency locator transmitter was undamaged but did not activate … until the wreckage was moved onto a flatbed trailer during recovery. The flight was tracked by satellite, but the staff at the national communications center failed to notice its disappearance for more than two hours. Some time after 7:30, they alerted Air Methods’ Operations Control Center, which launched a search. Company air- craft located the accident site at about 8:30 p.m., but because of the steep terrain and limited access had to summon another helicopter with hoist equipment to lower medics to the scene. The first rescuers reached the victims at 9:54, four and a half hours after the crash. The pilot had stopped breathing shortly after impact.
The paramedic found himself hanging in his straps out- side the high side of the wreckage. His glasses and helmet “were gone.” He cut himself free with his trauma shears and dropped to the snow, falling into a stream of fuel leaking from the ruptured tanks. The flight nurse was conscious but badly hurt, pinned under the wreckage with the right skid across his throat and jaw. The paramedic’s own injuries left him unable to walk. They tried to use their mobile phones but couldn’t get a signal. Temperatures dropped rapidly after the sun set, and both men began suffering from hypothermia. The flight nurse diagnosed himself with a collapsed lung, but his aspiration needles were in a pocket of his flight suit that was out of reach beneath the wreckage. His breathing became increasingly labored until he succumbed.
70 ROTOR SPRING 2019
His autopsy showed multiple rib fractures with a
left-sided flail chest (a serious condition where a seg- ment of the rib cage becomes detached from the chest wall) and significant internal bleeding from intraabdominal injuries. His Injury Severity Score was graded as 22 (severe), and the NTSB concluded that “it is unlikely that he would have survived until help arrived even if the initial notification of the crash had occurred more rapidly.” The paramedic was eventually able to signal the
search aircraft with the light on his mobile phone. He survived and provided investigators with his account of the flight.
The Takeaway It should go without saying: the purpose of satellite tracking is to guarantee immediate response when an aircraft can’t be accounted for. A prompt initiation of search-and-rescue efforts might have located the wreckage before sunset, making it easier for rescuers to reach the scene and minimizing hypothermia. Interviews with staff at the communications center suggested that unusually heavy volume in her sector might have overloaded the relatively inexperienced specialist tracking the flight, the kind of single-point failure institutional systems are presumably designed to prevent.
But of course there’d have been no need for search or rescue had the pilot chosen to cross the mountains at a conservative 1,000 feet above the peaks. Skies were clear, and the altitude records set by the AS350 B3 include landing on the summit of Mt. Everest, so neither the meteorological nor service ceiling was a factor. From outside, one can see no practical reason to risk the ship and its crew by zipping 30 feet over ridge- lines and racing down canyons at 150 knots. But as the paramedic recalled, “Each pilot has their own little route … I say they’re like surfers. They have their own little way they do things.” The accident pilot’s preferred route to Globe from the west passed “some rock for- mations … he just liked to fly by.” Three days after the accident, Air Methods’ chief pilot issued a critical bulletin announcing a zero-toler- ance policy for violations of the minimum VFR altitude standards set by the company’s General Operations Manual. Increasing consumer sales of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) were cited as a reason.
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