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Congressman Ed Case is not only wrong on helicopter tour safety, he and his supporters are ignoring the facts. Case and those making all the noise about, well, helicopter noise, wrap the noise issue and the safety issue into one. The two are not related and need to be addressed as separate issues.
Helicopters are noisy. The racket these aircraft generate is obnoxious, especially if you live under a flight path as I do. It’s not unusual for helicopters on Oahu to pass over the same area 80 or more times a day during peak periods when you include private pilots, police, fire and the military. That’s quite a lot of noise. Talk about a nuisance.
I get it. Those of us who are responsible operators understand that we need to do our best to mitigate noise or folks are going to rise up with torches and pitchforks and take matters into their own hands. I urge those who want to complain about the noise to log on to PlaneNoise.com. There, your complaints are collected, analyzed and passed onto the government for resolution.
What I take exception to is Ed Case and Michelle Matson (“Clouds continue over copter industry,” Island Voices, Jan. 15) pretending that there’s a safety problem when what they really mean is, “Stop flying over my house.” Case maintains that tour helicopters can fly however and wherever they want. He knows that’s not true. We comply with some of the strictest regulations in the country regarding safety and altitudes.
Case accuses tour helicopters of flying below 1,500 feet. Guess what? We take directions from air traffic control and we are instructed to be at or below 500 feet on departure. A flight path that on normal tradewind days includes Diamond Head, where Matson lives and seethes.
Helicopter pilots are allowed to go below 1,500 feet if weather dictates. That makes sense because if a pilot can’t see, the outcome is never good. The reason that fellow planted the Robinson R44 copter on a street in Kailua last year was likely due to obscured vision and loss of control. And the pilot on that Kauai flight last month evidently flew into poor visibility and hit a ridge.
Case demands stricter regulations over the tour industry, ignoring the fact that if pilots abided by current regulations, i.e., maintaining three miles of visibility, most Hawaii fatal accidents wouldn’t have happened. The call for requiring instrument ratings for tour pilots ignores the fact that tour pilots are already mandated to avoid zero visibility.
Matson gripes about helicopters flying over Punchbowl and Pearl Harbor, calling those flights “irreverent.” She and others should know that all aircraft in Class B airspace are directed by air traffic control, which dictates both the path and the altitude of arriving and departing flights. Paths and altitudes that include Punchbowl and Pearl Harbor.
The public should understand that we’re not just a bunch of yahoos deliberately ignoring rules and regulations. Crashes, along with being tragic, are just bad for business.
If critics and others truly want to fix the noise issue, work with us and don’t exaggerate and make up specious arguments about safety to support the noise agenda. Only by being truthful and listening to each other can we move ahead.
Richard Schuman is president of Schuman Aviation Co. Ltd., dba Magnum Helicopters and Makani Kai Air.
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