As expected, federal air-safety officials said Wednesday that all air-ambulance flights should operate under more stringent flight standards to halt a rash of fatal accidents in the industry.
Currently, only air-medical flight legs that carry a patient or organs come under rules with strict requirements for flying in bad weather.
“Positioning” flights to get air ambulances to patients or to return planes or helicopters to home bases after dropping off a patient have far more lax rules. Many accidents occur on those positioning flights, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
At a special hearing in Washington on problems in the air-medical industry, NTSB officials also released the probable cause of the crash of a medical flight near Rawlins, Wyo., on Jan. 11, 2005. The plane was operated by a Steamboat Springs air-ambulance company.
NTSB attributed the crash, which killed the pilot and two flight nurses, to “the pilot’s inadvertent flight into adverse weather (severe icing) conditions resulting in an aerodynamic stall impact with rising mountainous terrain during approach.”
“A factor contributing to the accident was the pilot’s inadequate planning for the forecasted icing conditions,” it added.
