Highlights of the 2024 Helicopter Accident Data

Welcome to the first episode of The Why Spotlight! Here we dive into super interesting (but often lengthy) reports, and highlight all the most important lessons. All in only about 5 minutes! ⏱️

For many pilots, having to go through large (and sometimes boring) reports is pretty annoying, but learning from important data can be very beneficial at the same time.

That’s where “The Why Spotlight” comes in ✅

In this series, we will feature accident reports, safety reviews, and regulatory documents, and make their most important message available to you in an easy to understand way! 💡

Basically, let us do the boring stuff so you can get straight to the juicy bits, without having to go through hundreds of pages.

Today, we start with EASA’s 2024 safety review, which covers all of European Aviation’s safety statistics. We’ll be focussed on helicopter accident data today, but the fixed wing side will be covered in the future as well, as there’s a lot to be learnt from both…

We’ll first cover all helicopter operation categories combined, and then go into specific operations for 2023 (2024 data will be in the 2025 review), like we did for the 2020 data.

Let’s dive in and see what we can learn here 👀

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All Helicopter Operations

Let’s start with some good news: overall helicopter accident rates are going down! ✅

Have a look at the total amount of accidents per year over the last 11 years:

As you can see, 2023 saw an overall reduction in the amount of accidents. We’ve had:

➡️ 7 fatal accidents
➡️ 29 non-fatal accidents
➡️ 3 serious incidents

If we look at the preceding 10 years (2013-2022), the average was:

➡️ 8.6 fatal accidents
➡️ 37.5 non-fatal accidents
➡️ 15 serious incidents

So our most recent numbers are quite a lot better for each category!

But what about actual fatalities? Well, have a look at this:

As you can see, we have an improvement again compared to the last 10 years, with:

➡️ 11 fatalities
➡️ 5 serious injuries

Compare that to the average of the last 10 years:

➡️ 11.8 fatalities
➡️ 20.9 serious injuries

Then finally, let’s look at why most helicopter accidents happened over the last 5-years period:

The top 5 are:

🔄 Loss of Control in Flight
❓ Unknown
💥 Airprox / ACAS alert / Midair Collision
🛬 Abnormal Runway Contact
🚀 Powerplant Failure / Malfunction

Loss of control in flight remains the biggest category, as it has for many years now. It has many reasons, one of which is Inadvertent Entry into IMC (IIMC), which we’ve covered here.

Commercial Air Transport Operations

Commercial Air Transport or CAT is defined as:

Which basically means: getting goods or people from A to B while getting paid for it 💰

Let’s have a look at the highlights for this category, we’ll start with the amount of incidents and accidents:

As you can see, 1 fatal accident, 6 non-fatal accidents, and 1 serious incident.

While the non-fatal accidents are higher than the 10 year average between 2013 and 2022, the other 2 have both gone down ⬇️

But when do things usually go wrong? We also have data on what flight phase is linked to the amount of occurrences, let’s take a look:

As you probably expected: the landing phase is linked to the most amount of occurrences, followed by the cruise phase 🚁 As we’ve discussed in downwind approaches and threat and error management, the landing phase is often the part of a flight with the most threats.

But within CAT, there are quite a few types of operations. How many occurrences happened within each type of operation?

In most years, HEMS usually takes the #1 spot. In 2023, you can see the number of accidents have halved compared to the preceding 10-year average though, pretty good progress!

What jumps out here is the ‘air taxi’ category, which shares the amount of occurrences with HEMS, on an uptrend. Not a good look! ❌

Specialised Operations

Let’s move on to Specialised Operations, or SPO. For those who don’t know, SPO is defined as:

Let’s have a look at the amount of accidents over time for SPO:

For SPO in 2023, we’re looking at:

➡️ 1 fatal accident
➡️ 7 non-fatal accidents
➡️ 1 serious incident

Compare this to the preceding 10-year average of:

➡️ 1.3 fatal accidents
➡️ 9.6 non-fatal accidents
➡️ 3.4 serious incidents

Which means that the amount of all 3 types of occurrences have reduced! ✅

What about occurrences based on flight phases, any difference with CAT?

Well, yea. The main difference is the spike in the ‘Manoeuvring’ category, which makes sense because of the nature of SPO:

And then finally, the operation type. What is the type of flying that brought the most occurences? Have a look:

For 2023, it was agricultural operations that unfortunately doubled ⬆️

The other noteworthy change is the construction and sling-loading category, which went from more than 5 on average between 2013 and 2022, to 0 in 2023! ✅

Non Commercial Operations

Non Commercial Operations, or NCO, has been a somewhat problematic area for many countries.

Flights operations in these stats are mainly flight training, test flights, leisure flights, and ferry flights.

Often, these include smaller helicopters and less strict requirements for flights compared with CAT and SPO.

Let’s start with the accident totals:

So:

➡️ 5 fatal accidents
➡️ 16 non-fatal accidents
➡️ 1 serious incident

Compared to an average between 2013 and 2022 of:

➡️ 4.5 fatal accidents
➡️ 21.9 non-fatal accidents
➡️ 5.8 serious incidents

Meaning that the fatal accidents isn’t really trending up or down, but luckily the other 2 are both trending down.

Why do they happen within NCO? Have a look:

Loss of Control in Flight is taking the top spot here, with all occurrences being accidents, not incidents.

Unfortunately both flight testing and training environments simply have more situations where loss of control becomes a larger threat, which is backed up by the data.

Talking about instruction and testing, what flight type is associated with the most occurences? Let’s see:

Flight instruction remains the operation with the highest amount of occurrences within NCO. While the amount is lower compared to the 10 year average, it’s still 8 occurrences per year.

There is a lot of discussion about how this could be reduced, from increasing the requirements to become a flight instructor, to outright removing certain training exercises from the syllabus. More on this in a future article.

Conclusion

There’s a lot to unpack every year after accident and incident data gets published. Unfortunately, we don’t have access yet to accurate data that corrects for the amount of flight hours.

If we truly want to compare data accurately, we need to correct for the amount of flying that happens.

For now though, we hope these highlights have been insightful. For the full EASA report, simply click here!

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