Kenny Keller (YouTube instructor) explains Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT) risks for commercial helicopter pilots, emphasizing how operational and commercial pressures can lead to poor decisions. He relates a personal EMS night-flight anecdote—an engine start problem, lingering low clouds after a storm, and a decision to continue at low altitude—stresses conservative VFR minimums (he used 3 miles/1,000 ft; his employer later required 2 miles/800 ft at night), and repeatedly advises landing when conditions become 'iffy' rather than attempting to continue and risk CFIT. He names his former employer (Omniflight) and underscores that safety sometimes conflicts with organizational or client pressure.
Questions this video answers
November 17, 2015
Five years
2 miles visibility and 800 feet ceiling at night
3 miles visibility and 1,000 feet ceiling at night
Omniflight
Chapters
CFiT controlled flight into terrain. I want you to really think about this at the commercial level is where you're going to be getting yourself more into these situations. Hopefully you're not getting into them at the private level and hopefully you don't get into them at the commercial level. But most likely you are, you're going to be in different circumstances now, flying for a living, flying for hire. And I'm telling you that companies still want to make money. No matter how much they tell you they want to be safe, they still want to make money. So you're still going to have these pressures that you put on yourself that come from the company you work for, comes from the photographer that's in the aircraft that's with you that wants that special downwind shot when you tell him you can't stop and come to a hover there and he's going, oh, come on, trust me, been there, done that. So understand CFIT controlled flight into terrain. It happens. If you don't know, you should know that EMS pilot is one of the most dangerous jobs in the country. And I flew EMS for five years, so I have my first hand experience with it. And if you do any research at all, you will find out that it is helicopter pilots. A lot of times crashing without the crew even on board, whether it's a maintenance flight or maybe they left the crew at the hospital and they're going back to their base. Why do pilots do these dumb things? It happens. I want to give you a story about when I was brand new to the ems. You know, I had been flying for five, six, seven years at that point when I got into EMS and I went to the basic training and of course there were warnings about CFIT and talking about it and we all understood the problems with it. So I get out working as a new EMS pilot and within the first probably few months, you know, I'm getting oriented and getting comfortable. At a certain point they let you start flying at night for a while, they keep you on days, they put me on nights and I get a call to go. We'll say 45 miles away from my home base and we fly down to the location, pick up the patient, get ready to leave, and my number two engine wouldn't start. So we call the flight off, patient goes by ground, they pick him up in an ambulance. About that time a storm comes through. So the storm passes, mechanic comes down, figures out what my problem is with the engine number two start. It was just a switch or something, very simple fix. And then I did a decision about making it back home. Well, now that the storm had gone through, usually after thunderstorm goes through, a lot of times they leave low hanging stuff, you know, clouds that just kind of linger. So I'm trying to make the decision about whether I want to fly back or not. And of course the mechanics there, and he's like, well, hey man, you know, if you want to leave the aircraft, you can ride back with me back to our home base. That's what I should have done. But young, brave, oh, you know, I'm all, I'm all ready to go here, I can do this. I'm checking the weather and, and they're telling us at the time they were, you know, the weather adas was saying like three miles and a thousand feet. Well, three miles and a thousand feet would have been fine if that's what it really would have been. But between where I was at and getting back home, there was not much ground reference lighting and there's not many weather reporting stations. And I can tell you it was a lot less than a thousand feet and it was a lot less than three miles. And I'm bebopping along through the middle of nowhere, almost no ground reference lighting. And I start lowering my altitude and I'm getting lower and I got down to probably, I don't even know for sure, it's been a long time ago, but I got down to two or 300ft. Well, you know, you got towers, you got unlit obstacles. There's all kinds of reasons why this is really, really a bad situation. And I'm getting nervous and I'm thinking, just land, get on the ground. I'm going to be one of those statistics. And for whatever reason I kept going and the weather got a little bit better. But then I think I had some iffy points along the way. I should have hands down landed the stupid aircraft. Even though it was two o' clock in the morning in the middle of nowhere. I should have found a place to land and put it on the ground. And that's why we do these dumb things sometimes because you want to get home, you don't want to be stranded out in the middle of nowhere. You don't want the embarrassment of calling and saying, hey, I screwed up, you know, I got into some bad weather, now I'm out in the field. Truth is, you gotta have the guts to do it. So as a new EMS guy, I did it. I made it back home, everything was fine. But I right there, I told myself, don't risk it. And I can tell you that later through the EMS career, our minimums were I think 2 miles and 800 at night. And I used VFR, I used 3 miles and a thousand feet. If I didn't have basic vfr, I wasn't going. And a lot of us become conservative because of the stupid mistakes that we make. And I'm just telling you that CFIT controlled flight and terrain is when you are, you continue to fly the aircraft, you get in an advertent imc, you are trying to get out of it, you're lowering your altitude and you fly into a mountainside or you just continually, maybe you haven't readjusted your altimeter and you think you have a few hundred feet and you end up flying the thing into the ground. So CFIT is a big deal. Controlled flight into terrain wrecks helicopters. It kills people. You are going to need to be very careful and there are going to be times where doing the right thing might cost you your job. I know plenty of pilots that have lost their jobs for standing up for their own decisions and when they knew the right thing was to not take a flight. And you know, the, a number one rule is to get home at the end of the day, go home at the end of the day. None of these flights are worth your life or your job. So spend some time researching cfit, think a lot about it and know that, you know, sometimes I say the more I learn about weather, the more I don't understand. And also, you know, it's just weird how we, we can say that we're going to be conservative and we're going to make good decisions and there's all these reasons why we go out and put ourselves in these stupid positions. And I know that the company I worked for was called Omniflight and they're no longer business, they got bought out by a bigger company. But that's okay. The point was during that time, you know, there was different ideas on whether you made a 180 turn or go inadvertent or I mean, claim an emergency call for help. At a certain point they said, guys, if it starts getting iffy like that, just land. We don't want you trying to turn around. We don't want you to try to go. You know, if you have to claim an emergency, do it. But if you can land and get on the ground versus trying to make it back flying IFR in an emergency, just put the thing on the ground, just land. So thinking about that, keep in mind in the conversion in the commercial environment, you are going to be faced with this problem, and you are going to have the need to stand your ground and make the right decisions. So you're going to need to be as knowledgeable as you can, be able to say no, Be able to have the guts. When you get into your. Into the. Into the soup, you get into a mess by accident, get the thing on the ground and walk away versus trying to make it the rest of the way and flying the thing into the ground.
