ACCORDING to the US-based National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Bell helicopters have been involved in 185 accidents with 75 fatalities in the past five years.
The Bell 206L-3, the model involved in Wednesday’s crash which killed National Guard Commander Evangelos Florakis and four others, has clocked up 18 accidents and five fatalities in the same period.
Reports on the 18 accidents for the most part involved external factors, the final reports said. But in preliminary investigations on the most recent five cases, all non-fatal, the pilots reported engine failure. The final report in a sixth case of alleged engine failure found that the engine had failed due to lack of proper maintenance, the NTSB said.
David Learmount, Operations and Safety Editor of UK-based Flight International magazine, who publishes a helicopter safety survey each year, told the Cyprus Mail yesterday that Bell is the most common and most popular make of helicopter in the world “and they don’t have a bad safety record”.
“When an accident happens it’s a combination of lots of things,” he said. “Helicopters are a very technically and mechanically complicated aircraft compared with fixed wing planes, and mechanical things are more likely to go wrong with them far more often. But with Bells more than with others? No, not really, not in proportion to how many of them there are in use. This is the most popular type of helicopter on the face of the planet,” Learmount added.
He said that helicopter accidents are more likely have a component of mechanical failure than fixed-wing aircraft accidents, which more often involve a human factor.
“It all depends on what they are doing at the time. Helicopters are only used because nothing else can do the job. So that means they get used in situations where frankly you’re asking for trouble. You’re in a difficult position to start with,” Learmount said.
Referring to his annual helicopter safety survey, he said that it’s “absolutely horrific” to read the kind of accidents helicopters are involved in. “In equal measure it’s to do with mechanical complexity and the kind of things people expect of them,” he added.
“Hovering next to an oil rig in a Force 10 storm in the middle of the North Sea in a cloud of spray so you can hardly see a thing, trying to haul people out of 30-foot waves bashing against the sides… it’s just a great place to be and that’s what search and rescue helicopters do. No one else would put themselves in this situation. So if anyone said to me ‘does that outfit have a good safety record?’ I’d be very angry at them for asking such a stupid question.”
Commenting on accident eyewitness accounts in general, Learmount said witnesses were often wrong in what they saw because they are actually about to witness something quite shocking that they were not expecting to see.
“They don’t know it’s going to be shocking and then all of a sudden it is — and then when they do a replay in their brain of what they saw, it often comes out in reverse order,” he said. “Very often you get twang, aircraft in trouble, fireball…. but on mental replay it’s fireball, trouble, twang.”
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
