Senator Proposes Adding Tougher Safety Requirements To FAA Funding Bill

Before Stacy Friedman lost her sister Erin in the 2005 downing of a medical transport helicopter in Washington, she never viewed the job as especially dangerous. In the two years since the Airlift Northwest Agusta A109 helo carrying nurse Erin Reed, nurse Lois Suzuki, and pilot Stephen Smith was lost in Puget Sound, however, Stacy has become a crusader for stricter helicopter ambulance safety standards.

Friedman, who lives near Sacramento, CA, is pushing for the addition of terrain awareness systems and cockpit voice and data recorders to medical ambulance flights. She has the support of Washington Senator Maria Cantwell, who has suggested adding tougher safety requirements to the FAA funding reauthorization bill now making its way through Congress.

Those suggestions are opposed by many within the medical transport industry, reports the Seattle Times. They say mandating such systems onboard medical helicopters would drive up the cost of lifesaving services, potentially grounding some operators -- while not doing very much to improve safety.

"The reality is there are going to be sick people who are not going to get health care because they cannot be flown," said Ed Marasco, owner of CJ Systems Aviation Group. The Pennsylvania-based company owned the Airlift Northwest helicopter that crashed in Washington in 2005.

Marasco suggested a more cost-effective safety addition would be night-vision goggles, so pilots could maintain visual references when flying in the dark through clouds.

As ANN reported, the helicopter carrying Erin Reed was returning to its base at Arlington Municipal Airport (AWO) in low night IFR conditions, after dropping off a patient in Seattle September 29, 2005. The helicopter disappeared from radar just past 9:00 pm PDT, impacting the water near Edmunds, WA. The NTSB ruled the probable cause of the crash was loss of control in maneuvering flight for reasons unknown.

A recent study by Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health found helicopter emergency crews are 16 times more likely to perish in a job-related mishap, than on average. According to the FAA, there were 83 accidents involving medical transport helicopters in a six-year period from 1998 through mid-2004.

A separate 2006 study conducted by the National Transportation Safety Board found most fatal accidents involving medical helicopters occurred without a patient onboard -- which might be due in part to tougher regulations governing flights when patients are in the helicopter. The FAA states pilots of helos transporting patients must maintain at least two miles visibility at low altitudes. No such minimum visibility requirement exists when flying without a patient, according to the Times.

The Association of Air Medical Services sent a letter to the Senate Commerce Committee in May, telling lawmakers the industry has worked to improve safety over the years -- adding imposing new regulations like the ones proposed would add "millions of dollars to the costs of out-of-hospital care and decreasing public access to needed emergency care — without a corresponding increase in safety."

Stacy Friedman has travelled to Capitol Hill three times, making a bit more inroads on each trip but failing to earn a face-to-face meeting with lawmakers. On the last trip, she met with a member of Senator Cantwell's staff, who suggested it would be easier to add tougher safety standards to the FAA bill, than to push for new regulations outright.

"He said sometimes when you ask for things, they happen," Friedman said, adding the proposed safety regulations are now in the Senate Commerce Committee. "Things take a lot of time to make happen in Washington."

FMI: www.senate.gov, www.aams.org, Read The NTSB Probable Cause Report