#188 HELICOPTER FATAL ACCIDENTS on the rise 2019

Fatal accidents. Fatal accidents. US hst, which is the US Helicopter safety team, perceives a deadly trend. Helicopter industry headed for the highest fatal accidents in more than a decade. You know, this is kind of upsetting in a way. I mean, when you read this, they talk about how we're possibly even going to catch 2008, which was one of the worst in. One of the worst. And I remember I was flying, actively flying an EMS in 2008. And you know, I've talked about this before, of course, but I'm. I'm beating it into your brains. In 2008, when it was happening, it almost felt like everybody was just numb to it, at least in the ems. It was like, oh, we just lost another. Another helicopter crew, you know, and. And I don't know if we do get kind of numb to it. I don't think I do. I think I stay pretty in tune with it. Just recently, I hadn't been reading accidents a lot like I normally do. And just funny, because yesterday Rex Alexander stopped. I flew with em. I flew with Rex during ems when I was in ems. He was my first base manager and we remain friends. And Rex just stopped yesterday. And Rex is involved with the helicopter safety team and he's involved with a lot of things. I mean, he is really deep into all kinds of stuff, right? So he's on the thumb, is on the pulse of what's going on in the industry, especially with accidents and safety and all these things. And Rex come through yesterday. He was doing some heliport advising and he just come through for lunch and I said, hey, you know, I haven't. I've been seeing a lot of accidents, but I haven't read anything recently, you know, and I've kind of the last few accidents to come out, I just haven't really even. I don't know, maybe I become a little bit numb to him. And I, and I asked him, how's it going? You know, is the EMS helicopter crashes getting any better? And he's like, yeah, not really. It's kind of on an upswing right now. And I'm like, really? And he goes, yeah, the U.S. helicopter safety team just put out a, just put out a notice and. And then boom. Right away, one of our HOGS members sent me the PDF. It just came out and it says, you know, usht ushst perceives deadly trend. Helicopter industry headed for highest fatal accidents in more than a decade. So over the next few days, I'm going to hit the topics. They point out seven different things that people need to watch out for. And these are things that we talk about all the time. And I think I've probably done a video, almost all of them, and we're going to hit them again because, you know, social media is great, right? And we all use it. Some of us use it more than others. And sometimes it gets a little bit to be too much, right? But a trend that I've seen for a long time is everybody wants to look at fancy pictures and people riding around in the cockpit and like, like, like, like, like. And, you know, when you put out a really good piece of safety content, it just doesn't get the traction that, you know, videos get that aren't promoting safety or, you know, even helicopters out doing really crazy stuff that gets on the Internet. And then people are like, wow, that pilot is doing, oh, he's so talented. And the shame is a lot of time what this pilot doing isn't necessarily talent, it's being stupid. I don't know. Today I wanted to make the point that, you know, we make these videos on a daily basis and it's all kinds of stuff, right? Like I keep saying, it's careers and training, but how many of you have really even stopped recently and read a helicopter accident report? I want to encourage you to do that. I luckily have had some really good instructors when I first started out doing this. And one of the first things I did or one of the first things they had me do when I was a private working on the private. And I don't remember where it was at, you know, around solo or before I got my check, right? At some point my instructor Brad said, hey, you know, he handed me a great big thick book of. And it was Robinson accidents, specifically because I was flying Robinson. And he goes, take this home. And he goes, I don't want you, I don't need you to read the whole entire book, but sit and leaf through some of these. And I did. And you know, I think that was a really important step. And I'm glad Brad did that because sitting and reading those accident reports really did. It really did help me want to learn and it helped me want to study and it helped me want to be safe. Because when you read them, you know, they're real world, right? And at that time I was reading mainly training accidents, and training accidents is one place where we have a lot of accidents. In this new article that just came out, or actually not the, the safety team article, it's going directly to the meat of a lot of the problems. But I read an article from Rotor and Wing yesterday and they were naming off the accidents that are, that have happened this year that are causing this upswing. And they were ems and they were executive charter and a couple other of the common commercial operations that are out there. So, you know, it didn't hone in on just training. And the comment from the FAA to Rotor and Wing was, you know, it's too early to really call a trend because they're still investigating a lot of these accidents. Right. So what this person from the FAA said was we don't really see a trend yet because it was kind of across the board, which, you know, I find interesting. So we can't blame, oh, we're going to blame EMS or we're going to blame, you know, heli logging, or we're going to blame this one. It's, it really looks, when you start looking through them, it's happening across the board. And without knowing, without going and researching those exact specific accidents that have happened this year, I know most of them now, I won't say most of them, but I know quite a few of them are going to be pilots flying in shitty weather. Right? We know this. And why does it continue to happen? I don't know, it's just easy for people to, you know, make bad decisions or what, make what you think is a good decision and then you just get put in a bad spot and you don't have the, oh, the knowledge or the training or you just push yourself to keep going when you should land or you should turn around. I think if you, if you start studying them, you're going to find that, sure, a few of them might be mechanical, but it's almost always the pilot, right? It's almost always a pilot doing something really dumb. So just today I want to encourage you, if you haven't read any accident reports recently, and I don't care whether you're brand new or you're seasoned pilot or you're CFI'd rusty CFI getting back into the training mode. If you haven't spent some time reading some accidents, I want to encourage you to do that. One examiner that we use has been big for several years on making somebody read accident reports during their oral portion of their checkride. And I think that's really good, right, because that's given the examiner's, given the applicant a student to sit and read through an accident and then ask the applicant, well, what do you think happened there? You know, and he's not, you know, busting guys because they, because they don't, you know, Answer absolutely the way he wanted them to answer. That's not the point. The point is to get people thinking about accidents, see what others do. And we know a lot of them, you know, are pilots flying into bad weather. A lot of them are selling with power, guy puts himself in a guy or girl puts himself in a bad situation, maybe doing a downwind landing. You know, as human beings a lot of the mistakes that we make are the same. So, you know, it is, I don't know. I mean, any helicopter accident is tragic. And like Rex and I were talking about yesterday, every time an accident happens, I get emails, you know, right away people email me or text me and ask me what I think happened. And when they're fresh like that, I don't, I don't want to put out an opinion because right after an accident, you know, you got family involved and I don't want to make comments on an accident that just happened in respect for the pilot that who may have lost his life or lost her life and they're not there to defend themselves. So you know, when it comes to recent accidents, I appreciate people asking me questions and, but Rex and I agreed, you know, we don't, when they're fresh like that, we just don't like to comment on them because in, in respect for that pilot because we weren't there, we don't know. And respect for the families, we don't usually comment much on recent accidents. Only when I did recently, I think it was one of the tour accidents. I just talked about how immediately there was a knee jerk reaction and there were some government officials saying we're going to ban this and we're going to ban that. But I didn't go into the details about that specific accident. I just talked about knee jerk reactions from government officials, which is common, right? I mean, and a lot of you have read these things recently that have come out and then all sudden some, you know, mayor's, oh, we're going to stop doing this and stop doing that. And, and Rex and I were even talking about how, you know, the headlines that come out sometimes are totally misleading on an accident, you know, and government officials spout off before they know what the regulations are, right. They don't know what a person is certificated to do and what not. So they go out there half cocked and make comments and headlines come out there really aren't fair or don't represent what really went on. So anyway, I want to put you in the mode of accidents and you know, they happen to everybody and if you have that attitude that it's not going to happen to you, you need to think again because they happen to everyone. You know, I've had mine I talk about all the time. And I just drinking coffee this morning. Oh, yeah, it's day 188, coffee with Kenny. By the way, I am Kenny Keller, creator of Helicopter Line Ground School. I started rolling on copy number two because I normally I wait till number three and I'm trying to get all ready to go. And today I just got up and I'm like, you know what? Boom. I'm going to hit this one now. Because I was sitting here drinking coffee, thinking about the people that I've flown with that are no longer here because they've died in aircraft accidents. The first one I can think of was a young CFI at a flight school I worked at. He was this airplane cfi, but he's somebody I knew and we joked around with and that happened early in my training. I don't remember whether I was at private or commercial, but he flew at the flight school that we worked at. And then right soon as I got into flying professionally, I flew with a guy at my first job, my second job, we did a parts run one day in an airplane. Next thing you know, he dies in an aircraft where he runs out of fuel. And then there's more that I can list and the ones I think of usually pilot did something dumb. So those of us that have been in the industry a while, we all know somebody that's had an accident and we probably know somebody who's lost their life. And I'm going to say this again, and I've had others make this comment. Helicopter pilots, you don't hear the guys talking about their accidents, not generally. And some guys will just like I do. And I do. And I like to tell them the story. I hate to say the word, I like telling the story. I just repeat the story and tell the story because I want you to understand that it can happen to you. And the one that happened to us was on a beautiful day. You know, I'm a firm believer in a bad judgment chain where you read about an accident and you learn about the decisions, that one stacked on top of another stacked on top of another, where anywhere along that bad judgment chain, if the pilot would have made the decision, I'm calling this off and I'm not going to, the accident probably wouldn't have happened. And many times there is a bad judgment chain. In our case, from the accident I was involved in, it was a beautiful day, just like this, you know, this time of year it was, it was sunny, it was warm, it was beautiful. Everything was going good. The aircraft was doing great. We were pre flighting, we were doing everything that we were supposed to be doing, we were doing. We weren't going out half cocked and just not pre flighting and doing things we shouldn't have been doing. That was not the case. It was a beautiful freaking day. Nobody thought this helicopter was gonna go apeshit and turn into a freaking mad Hornet. You know, it was, that's always say that helicopters are like, you know, they're like a beautiful butterfly, right? They're so smooth and they're so sweet. But man, when things go wrong, they get angry and they turn into a freaking monster. And so once you think about that, right, it's not a video to try to scare you, it's just a video to say, you know, if you think it can happen to you, it can. And if you're spending your time on social media clicking like on, you know, cute pictures and shiny helicopters with shiny paint and navigation lights and, but then that's all you ever do. I highly recommend you spend a little bit of that time maybe clicking on some actual knowledgeable videos where you learn something about flying or learn about safety or check out some articles on some accidents, maybe read this new, you know, something that came out from the helicopter safety team. I'll put the link down below on that. I'll put the link below so you can go check it out. But it's real. People, you know, people lose their lives and it's sad and always will be sad and people lose their lives in any profession and you know, you can lose your life driving your car down the road. So accidents are going to happen. But when there's an upswing and they start saying we're looking at, you know, breaking records again, could it be coincidental or you know, how much of it's coincidental, how much of it is pilots maybe being behind the game. And I'm going to be 100% flat out honest. The one gentleman that I talk to all the time, good friend of mine of a long time, 40 year pilot who's in the EMS industry, his complaint is knowledge. And his complaint for EMS, he said, you know what, Kenny, he was working as a check airman for quite a while and he said I'd be shutting bases down left and right on knowledge, but I can't because everybody's already short staffed anyway, anyways. And some of these guys that I probably ought to fell on a Checkride or an annual, you know, 135 checkride. You know, I'm going to shut the base down. So sometimes he goes the extra mile to help, you know, get him back up to speed. But he's like, the knowledge sucks a lot of times in the EMS industry. And he said, you know, he gets frustrated because he'll tell him, look, guys, you work 12 hour shifts and you know, I'm coming to do a 135 checkride. And I can tell you started studying the night before, you know, he said, you've got 12 months where you're getting paid a decent wage 12 hours a day. Half the time you're sitting around watching, you know, YouTube videos or napping or watching TV. You could be cracking that poh open and you could be doing some studying, you know, before I arrive. And I saw it too when I was doing it. And you know, I mentioned DMS. I'll mention law enforcement. Brian Rutledge, who's a 30 year aviator, flies in California. He's a head honcho for one of the lead aviation units. And he said, Kenny, it's the same thing in law enforcement, okay? There's individuals who do study and who care and really stay on top of the game, but there are many that, that don't. And Brian will tell me, he goes, it's the same thing in police, aviation, law enforcement. You know, guys get in there, helicopter, fly their 2 hour shift or their patrols or whatever, and then go watch tv, take a break, eat or whatever. And he goes, guys aren't always studying like they should be in their knowledge. A lot of time is behind the game. So I think it's pretty safe to say, you know, and I see it in the CFI world, it's really about being as knowledgeable as you can be. And if you want to be a safe and prudent pilot, it means you got to study. And it means you need to study more than just once. You don't just study to get your ratings. You need to continually learn and continually train. And it's hard, I guess, if you're not instructing. I've stated as an, I've stayed active as an instructor for 20 years. No matter whether I was flying EMS or whatever I was doing, I've always been instructing. And I like that because it helps keep me fresh. That's how I keep my knowledge fresh. So many guys will get into an opportunity or guys or girls, and then they quit instructing, they don't instruct anymore. I don't want to do that. And then I had that attitude at one point too. But it did take me long to realize. Staying with instructing helps keep your knowledge fresh. So if you're not doing instructing and you're just flying a commercial operation, how are you going to keep your knowledge fresh if you're just doing your flights and then goofing off when you're not flying? Right. So I really think knowledge is key. And I think knowledge probably in some of these accidents, probably knowledge might have been a problem. And not even knowledge, maybe just a person not refreshing their knowledge, not sitting back and really thinking, you know, it can't happen on a beautiful day when everything is hunky dory, bad things can happen. You know, I'm gonna wrap it up over the next few days. We're gonna cover some of these, we're gonna go through the seven, heck with that, I'm gonna try to hit them all. I'm gonna wrap it up now because as my daughter says, you go on too long. Dad. Take the time. In the near future, read some accident reports. If you, if you're flying, you're rusty on your knowledge. Go back and do some refresh, Read the helicopter flying handbook, pull out your poh. Go refresh your memory on emergency procedures, I will tell you I do it. And if I, you know, especially if I'm going to fly an aircraft I haven't flown in a little while, where the numbers aren't fresh in my head and emergencies may not be fresh, I always say all the different aircraft I fly, most of the procedures and most everything I do are the same. But you do have some different numbers and maybe a few different things between different aircraft. I'll do it. If I'm going to jump in an aircraft I haven't flown in a little while, I'll pull the POH and check it. And even like the instrum that I fly, you know, often, I'll still once in a while pull out the POH and just go through and refresh my knowledge. Because sometimes what you remember isn't exactly the way it reads, you know. And we all learn and I learn something new every single day. Every single day. Alright, I'll wrap it up. Subscribe to the channel. Put your comments down below. When you subscribe, click that little bell and we'll see you in Dunny189. Go read some accident reports. Do it now.