The Medical Helicopter Industry Grows Up….Maybe?

The medical helicopter industry is one that my father has spent much of his post-Army career in as a lead mechanic. The kinds of shenanigans discussed in this Washington Post story are all too well-known in our family, especially because we suffered financially on numerous occasions when my father would cease employment with a company he felt was risking the lives of crew and patients by demanding steep, untenable cuts to repair budgets or to toe the line on safety regs (or just outright violate them) in order to obtain more profit. My father has an old-school character of integrity and stubbornness that seemed to prevent him from taking such blatant defiance of common safety sense lightly or quietly.

People die as a result of such short-sighted decisions, and the FAA and others do very little about it in this industry. Maybe, maybe that will change, as this article seems to imply.

In my time in the Navy, my convictions about the need for stringent aviation regulation for carriers and providers serving the public was reinforced by the instances of “gundecking” (falsification of maintenance documents) that seemed to happen every month on the ship, sometimes leading to terrible near or actual mishaps. Always, the sailor responsible was held to account in a manner which was highly detrimental to their immediate finances, reputation among the crew and career. Yet, many of these instances were people who just “didn’t feel like doing it” or who “got in too deep and didn’t ask for help”.

Now, if sailors are willing to risk literally everything (from money to career) for mundane reasons, I am supposed to believe ardent de-regulators and reflexively anti-government forces that the FAA and assorted regulations are unnecessary or too powerful?  There may be a good rationale for de-regulation in other industries, but we need a much, much more powerful FAA or a private organization replacing it in the future with incentives to harshly police the aviation industry on such matters.