Case Study: Flight For Life 2024 Tail Rotor Strike

On July 19^th of 2024, Alpine Rescue Team (ART) called for assistance from FFL to transport an injured hiker who had fallen on St. Mary’s Glacier.  The weather was good, although storms were forecast to move in that afternoon.  The Lifeguard 1 pilot circled to burn fuel while ART members packaged the patient.  But upon landing, the pilot found a bent strike tab at the end of the tail rotor blade. Strike tabs are thin pieces of metal along the framework of each main and tail rotor designed to indicate slight contacts made with anything in the air or on the ground.

The pilot later reported that he and the crew never felt a thing and wouldn’t have known there was a tail rotor strike without a post-landing inspection.  It was the second tail rotor strike of 2024; earlier in the year, Lifeguard 2 had put its tail rotor in the dirt while landing on a road in a rural Blackhawk neighborhood.  The post-incident inspection revealed the cause on St. Mary’s Glacier to be contact with willows.  

“We put a lot of time into looking at the causes because it’s imperative that we prevent this from happening,” said Sean McConnell, chief flight nurse, during the annual FFL meeting in Frisco on October 23rd.  “But our data wasn’t very good.  We began looking at policies and did a root cause analysis, and we found some things we needed to fix.”

There were many challenges that quickly arose besides the helicopter being grounded. The LG1 team did not have means of getting back to base with lots of gear, the weather was moving in, and mechanics were responding to evaluate the aircraft. Additionally, there were many hikers asking if the helicopter had crashed. False information quickly circulated on social media and the FFL communication center started receiving inquiries from local news stations. ART’s PIOs were asked to post on social media on FFL’s behalf and this helped with tamping down the rumor mill.

The after-action review included FFL leadership, ART leadership and the helicopter manufacturer, and the root cause analysis revealed major causal factors to include communication, situational awareness, training, and landing zone size and location.  ART added that while the ground contact was very experienced, they were also perhaps too comfortable.  After much discussion and evaluation, FFL came to the following long-term solutions:

• Improvement of the LZ identification process.  
• Practicing distance estimation
• Training focused on avoiding general questions and using a challenge/response format to assure closed loop communication, for example, “Do I have 20 feet?” instead of, “Is the tail rotor clear?” 
• Scheduling more “boots on the ground” training with BSAR teams

LG1 was cleared to fly back to Denver the next morning. Once in the shop it took two weeks and an estimated $150,000 to repair, illustrating the high impact of such a seemingly small incident.