Articles for category My Two Cents Worth
I’ve flown my share of dramatic life-saving helicopter missions in my 45-year aviation career. I’ve even put myself in harm’s way to save the lives of four soldiers pinned down by enemy fire in Vietnam. The most harrowing rescue to date didn’t occur while at the controls of a helicopter, rather it was a byproduct of having been a helicopter air ambulance pilot. The split-second decision I made that day held consequences too dire to contemplate, as I could have easily landed in a Middle Eastern jail charged with murder.
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My Two Cents Worth
Has anyone ever said to you, “But we’ve always done it this way”? It’s a complacency trap that once held the potential for dire consequences for five of us employed as HEMS pilots for the king of Saudi Arabia.
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My Two Cents Worth
If I were to answer the question as to why I love the helicopter industry so much, I would have to say it’s because of the quirky characters I’ve met and worked with over the years. Characters that immediately come to mind are guys like “Lofty” because of his extraordinary height, “Bambi” because of his doe-brown eyes, a Brit we called “Captain Kleenex” because he had a sinus condition that caused him to leave tissues strewn about all over the cockpit, “Too Tall McCall” because he was short, and an Australian we all called “Trackless” because he was even shorter than Two Tall. (In fact, he was much shorter because his legs were so short his butt would drag behind him and wipe out his tracks, hence the name.) There was also Robert “Don’t call me Bob” because that’s how he introduced himself, “Squeaky Cheeks” because he had an odd walk, a New Zealander we called “Sumo” because he resembled a Sumo Wrestler, a Brit we called “Crusher” because he landed on a load handler hooking up an underslung load on a wellhead in the oil field and “slightly” crushed him.
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My Two Cents Worth
The problem with communication is the perception that it’s been achieved.
—George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright
Boy, was ol’ George right. Communication is central to effective crew resource management. An ambiguous message, whether written or spoken, can lead to fatal consequences. With that thought in mind, one would think airline executives, when drafting memos to flight crews, would take great pains to avoid ambiguity at all cost. Apparently, they don’t. Consider the following 1996 memo distributed to pilots at British Airways in an effort to clarify new pilot role titles:
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My Two Cents Worth
Maintenance engineers and mechanics have known about ‘The Dirty Dozen’ for years. They are the 12 most common human error preconditions or conditions that act as precursors to accidents or incidents for mechanics.
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My Two Cents Worth
In the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner hears ghostly voices coming from his Iowa cornfield telling him, “If you build it they will come,” meaning he should build a baseball diamond and former members from the Chicago Black Sox would come. Each day for the two months that I worked building a crew resource management instructor’s course, a similar line kept replaying in my head: What if I build it and no one comes?
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My Two Cents Worth
“The doctor told me I’d never walk again,” former Utah flight nurse Stein Rosqvist told the group with obvious emotion. “I saw that wheelchair being pushed towards me down the corridor and said, ‘That’s definitely not for me.’”
Through months of physical therapy by a nurse that would not permit him to say, “I can’t,” Stein walks today. His is just one of the stories I heard during the three-day digital story workshop I attended recently in Denver, Colorado.
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My Two Cents Worth
Last year, HAI President Matt Zuccaro pushed his safety message, “Land the Damn Helicopter,” reminding us that as a last resort when we’ve run out of options, we have the power to break a potential link in an error chain by simply landing.
Research into why helicopters crash isn’t statistically different than other segments of aviation. It is pretty much agreed worldwide that 80 percent of all aviation accidents have an element of human error. Crew resource management (CRM) training can save the day before we need to resort to landing the damn helicopter. CRM, if practiced religiously, will keep your good hands from taking you somewhere your mind hasn’t been.
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My Two Cents Worth
By the time I was four years old I knew I was going to be a pilot, and that was that—period. At four
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My Two Cents Worth
I was flying as copilot for Ian MacPhail in a Bell 412EP over the Arabian Gulf one bright and sunny
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Categories:
My Two Cents Worth