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(WROC) – Three people avoided injury after a Mercy Flight helicopter pilot reported a malfunction and made an emergency landing Sep. 19 at Canandaigua Airport in Ontario County.

Air Methods operator Mercy Air has completed a landing-zone training exercise with an emergency response team from mining company Rio Tinto at the Boron Mine in Boron, California.

(The Greek Herald) – Helicopter crews from Australia’s McDermott Aviation are helping local firefighters battle a wildfire that started Aug. 11 in Athens, Attica.

(WRC-TV) – An AH-64 Apache crashed during routine flight training Aug. 5 at the US Army base at Fort Novosel (formerly Fort Rucker) in Dale County, Alabama. A flight instructor died and a student pilot sustained injuries in the accident.

(USA Today) – Experts from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University discuss how extreme heat can ground flights, including helicopter air medical services, following the Jul. 6 death of a motorcyclist in California’s Death Valley National Park where a rescue crew could not fly due to temperatures topping 120°F.

Van Horn Aviation, founded in 2001, designs and manufactures tail and main rotor blades for a number of Bell helicopter models.

Bonneville Dam, Columbia River, Oregon and Washington Aug. 8, 2019 Wilson Construction MD 500E Pilot: Ron Stewart Photo by Mark Bennett

Former HAI Board Chairman and retired Air Methods Corp. (AMC) Assistant Chief Pilot James O. Wisecup, 71, died Jul. 30, 2020. Wisecup, a 16,000-hour dual-rated pilot, retired from his post with AMC, a helicopter air ambulance (HAA) operator, in July 2019. In June of this year, he was awarded the FAA’s Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award in recognition of his 50 years of professional, safe flight.

One of the worst parts about reading accident reports is seeing how the accident chain was forged, link by link, especially as you know what the final result will be. If it were a horror movie, you would yell at the screen, “Stop scud running!” or, “Find a landing site now!”

When there are only seconds in which to respond, thorough drilling in the appropriate procedures can be crucial to successfully confronting a life-threatening emergency. With no time to puzzle out a response or even read a checklist, survival depends not just on remembering the correct sequence of steps but on having practiced it recently and often enough to execute it precisely and without hesitation—in a situation certain to be more ­chaotic and frightening than the typical training environment.