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DATA Acquistion
// PAUL WILLIS
Safety in sight
A ground-breaking study is extensively
flight testing vision systems for
helicopters to improve flight safety
t the Federal Aviation
Authority’s (FAA) flight test
center at Atlantic City airport,
New Jersey, a major study is
underway. FAA researchers are in the midst of an
exhaustive long-term testing regime of the use of
Enhanced Flight Vision Systems (EFVS) in helicopters.
The study will eventually contribute to the
development of FAA operational rules and criteria for the
use of EFVS in helicopters. Similar regulations already
exist for fixed-wing aircraft.
The main impetus for the study has been to improve
flight safety, says research program manager Cliff
Johnson. He says, “From the work we’ve been doing with
the US Helicopter Safety Team – an offshoot of the
International Helicopter Safety Foundation – we’ve
adopted a target of a 20% reduction in the helicopter
fatal accident rate by 2020, with the aim of zero accidents
in the future.”
With these ambitious goals in mind the Helicopter
Safety Team (HST) worked with safety experts in the
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industry to carry out a review of fatal accidents over a
five-year period from 2009 to 2014. The accident analysis
revealed the three most common causes of fatal
accidents: loss of control, flying into bad weather and low
altitude operations.
As the HST looked around for safety enhancements
to mitigate against these dangers, interest grew in
“bringing over technology from fixed-wing to helicopters
to improve visibility in low visibility environments as
well as normal operations,” says Johnson. “We identified
several accidents where had the pilot had some of these
systems on-board there may have been a better outcome.”
IMPROVING PILOT VISION
EFVS are a suite of technologies that provide visual
data to the pilot to help them see and understand
their surrounding terrain. The technologies
deployed in EFVS include enhanced vision
systems (EVS), synthetic vision systems (SVS)
or a combination of the two, known as
combined vision systems (CVS).
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