Are you a helicopter instructor wondering why Flight Training never mentions your line of work? Or a fixed-wing CFI wondering what life’s like in the wonderful world of rotorcraft?
From a safety standpoint, the similarities between airplane and helicopter instruction are more striking than the differences—after taking into account the differences between the aircraft themselves.
Fixed-wing types watching autorotations may find this hard to believe, but the rates of instructional accidents are almost identical in both categories—and at about 4.5 per 100,000 flight hours, they’re about one-third lower than the rates on non-instructional flights. Fatal accident rates are likewise almost exactly the same, about 0.4 per 100,000 hours—less than half the risk on other types of flights.
The kinds of things that go wrong share some resemblances, too. The Air Safety Institute has just begun analyzing helicopter accidents, but a review of 2010 data found that autorotation practice was indeed the most frequent source of trouble. Add in losses of control during actual landings, and you’ve accounted for half the helicopters that got bent on training flights that year. As it happens, attempts to land also account for just about half of all crack-ups during fixed-wing training. In both categories, about 15 percent were caused by either known mechanical failures or unexplained losses of engine power, and one-eighth to deficient technique during takeoffs.
There were differences, though, in who did the bending. In airplanes, almost 70 percent of instructional accidents over the past 10 years were in primary training. Two-thirds of those were on student solos. In helicopters, primary instruction accounted for less than half, of which solo flights by student pilots made up only one-quarter. Multiply the fractions, and you’ll find that students left to their own devices crashed more than 45 percent of the airplanes damaged during flight training—but barely 10 percent of the helicopters. In both, though, 70 percent of fatalities occurred on dual flights.
That doesn’t mean your students are safer without you. Whether their wings rotate or stay put, more than 70 percent of their training is typically dual—including almost all the really tricky stuff, like simulated engine failures and those practice autorotations.
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