A whistle-blower warned federal authorities of potentially dire consequences from alleged mismanagement of the Maryland State Police aviation program just 17 days before Sunday’s helicopter crash in Prince George’s County killed four people.
And another critic of the state aviation program claimed that the helicopter involved in Sunday’s crash had been badly damaged in a collision several years ago, but that the accident was never reported.
“Your immediate attention is requested to prevent loss of life,” began the Sept. 11 message from Pete Peterson, a helicopter pilot for the Maryland State Police. The e-mail was sent to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s inspector general hot line.
“There is strong evidence of deeply troubling latent failures within the management of the [Maryland State Police Aviation Command]” Peterson wrote, alleging that aircraft accident and incident reports were not submitted as required and maintenance operations were not compliant with industry standards.
“Moreover, I believe that internal aviation safety reports have been bottled up, ignored, or sanitized to protect mismanagement,” Peterson said, before requesting a meeting with a federal investigator.
Peterson told the Examiner Monday that he stands by his letter but would comment no further.
The Examiner received Peterson’s letter from Marv Holt, a retired state trooper helicopter pilot with 24 years of flight experience who’d been working with state legislators to call attention to similiar safety and maintenance concerns.
Holt said he was familiar with the doomed helicopter. He said it had been so badly damaged after a collision with a building in 2000 while being taxied by another pilot that it had to be lifted off a landing pad with a crane.
“There were little pieces of blade all over the pad,” Holt said. “The air frame was damaged, the body of the helicopter, the engines, transmissions — it took a month or two to do the repairs.”
There’s no record of the incident, Holt says, because it was not reported by management.
Keith Holloway, spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, said Monday that officials were looking into the maintenance and history of the aircraft but could not comment on Holt’s allegations.
Holloway did say that the helicopter that crashed did not have a terrain awareness warning system, which could have alerted the pilot to how close the chopper was to trees in Walker Mill Regional Park.
Only three of the 12 helicopters in the Maryland State Police’s fleet are equipped with the system, Holloway said, despite a 2006 recommendation from the safety board that all medical emergency helicopters carry the technology.
“There are a number of things that could ultimately have caused this accident,” Holloway said.
