Tragedy has family on mission

By Owen Boss

Staff Writer

HATFIELD - A local woman and her family are preparing to travel to Washington to advocate for better practices by life-flight helicopters.

On June 30, 2005, Susan McGlew lost her brother, William Podmayer Jr., when the medical evacuation helicopter he was working on crashed in Colorado. Two of his colleagues at Tri-State CareFlight, pilot Jim Saler and paramedic Scott Hyslop also died in the crash. An investigative report blamed the crash on "a loss of engine power for undetermined reasons."

Since the accident, McGlew joined an advocacy group called Safemedflight, which will appear before the House Subcommittee on Aviation on April 22. At the hearing, McGlew said the group will ask Congress to pass a law requiring that all flights carrying medical personnel are done in accordance with the same regulations used for commuter airliners.

The group was founded in 2005 by the family of a flight nurse who died in an accident. It seeks laws that will require the development and implementation of flight-risk evaluation programs, formalizing dispatch and flight-following procedures and the installation of terrain-awareness and warning systems on all rescue aircraft.

"The problem right now is that working on a rescue helicopter is an especially dangerous occupation because there are much different flight rules for when they have a patient or organ onboard and when they do not," McGlew said.

According to Safemedflight's Web site, when responding to emergencies, pilots are not mandated by the FAA to have a black box onboard, rely on air traffic controllers or adhere to restrictions related with flying in bad weather, exceptions that McGlew believes make working onboard a rescue helicopter unnecessarily dangerous.

Troubling statistics found on the group's Web site include that in 2004, The National Safety Council found that the death rate of EMS flight crew members was 75 per 100,000 person-years, which is 16 times the occupational death rate of 4.6 for all U.S. workers. Also, the average rate of fatal helicopter EMS crashes per 100,000 hours from 2000 to 2004 was 1.8. At that rate, an EMS pilot or crew member flying just 20 hours per week during a 20-year career would have a 37 percent chance of dying in a fatal crash.

One reason McGlew said the group is rallying for safer regulations more than ever is that last year was one of the deadliest on record for crew members on airborne medical transports.

In 2008 alone, 13 accidents involving helicopter rescue crews resulted in 29 fatalities, and in the past six years, there have been 85 accidents resulting in 77 fatalities.

According to the group's Web site, In 2006, the National Transportation Safety Board completed a special investigation of EMS flight operations and made four recommendations to the FAA to improve EMS flight safety, all four of which the FAA rejected.

The hearing, which will be held at 10 a.m. in the Rayburn House Office Building, will focus solely on the "oversight of helicopter medical services."

For questions regarding the hearing, residents are encouraged to contact the Subcommittee on Aviation at (202) 225-9161, and for more information about Safemedflight, visit the group's Web site at www.safemedflight.org.

Owen Boss can be reached at oboss@gazettenet.com