Helicopter Safety Team Unveils Heli-Expo Seminars

The U.S. Helicopter Safety Team, a collaborative effort of government and industry leaders focused on improving helicopter safety, this week announced 17 educational classes to run during the upcoming Heli-Expo in Dallas March 6-9. The USHST says the bumper list of educational seminars at Heli-Expo represents the largest number of individual workshops the group has ever organized for the annual helicopter extravaganza.

Heli-Expo attendees will be able to choose from topics such as the Top 10 Undesirable Attitudes, Autorotations: Reality Exposed, Human Factors: Protecting Us from Ourselves, Flight Instructor Intervention and Risk Prevention, The Fright of Night Flight, Helicopter Flight Data Monitoring 101, The Superhero Helicopter Pilot: Training for the Industry's Future and more.

The USHST team chose the topics based on data that showed 50 percent of the 104 accidents reviewed during a five-year period pointed to just three major causes: loss of control in flight, unintended flight into IMC conditions and low-altitude operations.

USHST cooperative efforts have driven a 27 percent decrease in U.S. civil helicopter accidents since the organization’s inception in 2013, as well as a 43 percent decline in the number of fatal accidents. The USHST’s more recent goal is to reduce fatal helicopter accidents by an additional 20 percent by 2020.