Case pushes aircraft safety

LIHUE — Hawaii Congressman Ed Case on Friday said “Tour helicopter and small aircraft operations are not safe, and innocent lives are paying the price.”

Case responded to the news of the fatal helicopter crash on Kauai.

“This is such a deep tragedy, not only for the seven lives feared lost, but that we must confront this reality in Hawaii for the third time in just one year,” he wrote in a press release.

Early this year, in April, a tour helicopter crashed in a suburban Hawaii community, killing all three people aboard. In June, a skydiving plane crashed on Oahu and killed 11 people, including a Kauai man.

Case’s Safe and Quiet Skies Act (HR 4547), introduced Sept. 1, would impose strict safety, noise and community-disruption regulations on the tour helicopter and small aircraft industry nationwide, including required FAA adoption of NTSB recommendations such as the “sterile cockpit rule” required of commercial airlines (pilots must focus only on aircraft operation and safety; no tour duties).

Case said “the tour-helicopter and small-aircraft industry itself is completely incapable of self-regulation. In our Hawaii alone, the industry, while stridently arguing that it is safe and sensitive to neighborhoods, has in fact ignored any sensible safety improvements, instead dramatically increasing in recent years its volume of flights, at all times of day and night, in seemingly all weather, over more residential neighborhoods and to more risky and remote locations, at lower altitudes, while completely failing to address ground-safety and community-disruption concerns.”

He said it is not just about the safety of visitors.

“Every year thousands of tour-helicopter and small-aircraft flights fly thousands of flights directly over hundreds of thousands of our households, businesses, cemeteries, parks and other places throughout Hawaii where we all live, work, play and remember our lost ones,” he said. “How many more wakeup calls do we need, how much more risk and disruption must we tolerate?”

The Garden Island called several helicopter companies on Kauai on Friday and asked to speak to representatives about safety protocols. All declined to comment.