Tuesday wasn’t the first experience with helicopter crashes for two of the companies affected.
Last year alone, CJ Systems Aviation Group — which employed the pilot in Tuesday’s crash — was involved in five crashes.
CJ Systems hired an external auditor to examine its record. Company spokeswoman Sandy Koeppl told The Examiner that the audit found no infractions but made general “cultural” recommendations for improving communications among employees.
“Each and every day, we make sure our company operates safely,” she said. “What we do is vital to public health.”
Officials said Wednesday that it was too early in the investigation even to guess at what brought down the Eurocopter EC 135-P1.
This was at least the third Eurocopter crash in the United States this month. On May 5, a pilot survived his chopper’s crash in a Louisiana swamp.
On Monday, a Florida couple walked away from a wreck in upstate New York after their Eurocopter lost hydraulic power and crash-landed.
In 2004, failed hydraulics were blamed when a television station’s Eurocopter crashed onto some rooftops in Brooklyn, N.Y. Eurocopter’s hydraulics were also the culprit in a fatal crash in Canada in 2003.
Eurocopter officials did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
Though flown by CJ Systems, the chopper in Tuesday’s crash was used by MedStar Health. MedStar spokeswoman Paula Faria said that particular helicopter had passed an inspection last month and was in good working order.
Tuesday’s was the latest in a series of helicopter ambulance wrecks that have left dozens dead in the past few years and worried federal officials.
Helicopter-ambulance crashes increased more than 29 percent between 1992 and 2001, the National Transportation Safety Board found in a study released earlier this year. The study found that:
» There were 55 helicopter-ambulance crashes between 2002 and 2005 that killed a total of 54 people.
» The rate of such crashes had increased from 3.53 crashes per 100,000 flight hours to 4.56 crashes per 100,000 flight hours between 1992 and 2001.
