Jet Pilots Cite Peril of Copter Activity

The Frontier Airlines jet had just left the runway at John Wayne Airport on its Saturday morning flight to Denver when Capt. Keith Sleater called “gear up” to the co-pilot, and the massive wheels began to rise.

The aircraft and its 99 passengers were committed to flight. That’s when Sleater saw the helicopter.

“Because of the low airspeed and altitude, I was unable to take any evasive action,” Sleater wrote in his report to the Federal Aviation Administration. The police helicopter was on a virtual “collision course,” he said. “My only thought was: Unless he gets out of my way, we will hit him.”

The helicopter was barely 100 feet ahead of the oncoming jet, the pilot said, when it turned sharply to the right and landed safely.

That Jan. 25 incident was, according to Sleater, his third near collision with a helicopter since November at John Wayne Airport, where helicopters take off and land near the airport’s two runways.

‘Most Dangerous Airport’

“Most of our pilots have indicated to me that they’ve also had problems at John Wayne Airport with helicopters,” Sleater said. “John Wayne, let me say, is the most dangerous airport I have been in in some 24 years of professional flying.”

In his incident report, Sleater said: “The safety of my passengers, crew and aircraft must be in my direct control. At Santa Ana, it is apparently not. In over 35 years and 25,000-plus hours of flying, this is the closest I have come to another aircraft in flight with the exception of formation flying in the Air Force.”

The incident was one of four near collisions between airliners and helicopters that the Air Line Pilots Assn. brought to the attention of a federal advisory committee here this month as part of a year-old effort by both to reduce conflicts between commercial jets and helicopters flying into the nation’s major airports.

Though the Federal Aviation Administration believes the potential for conflicts between jetliners and helicopters is minimal and there is no need for further regulation, an organization of airline pilots said it is “a problem of nationwide magnitude.”

Problems Elsewhere

“We have problems at Washington, Miami, New York, and just about any major airport where you have a significant number of helicopter operations,” said John O’Brien, director of engineering and air safety for the Air Line Pilots Assn.

The nation’s fleet of helicopters has grown astronomically in the last decade. And urban airports with no room to expand have had to fit helicopter takeoff and landing areas next to busy airliner runways, taxiways and fueling ramps. Though helicopter pilots and airline pilots are nearly always under the guidance of air traffic controllers, they are frequently communicating on separate radio frequencies that do not allow them to hear each other’s positions.

The result: several recent near collisions and predictions by some pilots of tragedy unless something is done. Among the near misses:

- At Washington National Airport last September, an Eastern Airlines shuttle plane was taking off just as a helicopter began rising over the end of the runway. The turbojet quickly aborted the takeoff but ran off the end of the runway and came within 50 yards of plunging into the Potomac River. None of the 175 passengers aboard, including David Hartman, host of ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America,” were injured.

- A Minnesota state helicopter patrolling near President Reagan’s motorcade came within about 300 feet of a collision with a Boeing 727 landing at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in 1983, forcing the jet to swerve to the left.

- A British Airways Boeing 757 slammed on its brakes at London’s Heathrow Airport last August to avoid hitting a helicopter carrying Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

- At Miami in late January, a helicopter passed directly over a Boeing 727 on its landing approach. “The situation was such that if the jet had to abort the landing, the pilot said he would not have been able to avoid the helicopter,” the Air Line Pilots Assn. said in its report to the air traffic committee.

The pilots association also has complained that helicopters sometimes are allowed to fly over airline refueling or loading areas, “which is not the safest way to operate,” O’Brien said.

Locations for Heliports

In Southern California, where there are an estimated 167,000 helicopter flights each year, government officials say finding locations for new heliports may be the best solution.

There are already 203 heliports within the region, including 29 in Orange County, and most of them are little more than private roofs.

Orange County officials estimate there were about 3,000 to 5,000 helicopter flights at John Wayne Airport last year, many of them from a privately owned helicopter school located at the west side of the airport. About 30 helicopters are based at John Wayne.

“We’ve seen quite a healthy growth in the number of helicopters throughout the region, and we are also seeing new air taxi operators coming onto the scene,” said Tim Merwin, spokesman for the Southern California Assn. of Governments. The association recently got an FAA grant to study, among other things, the safety implications of this burgeoning helicopter fleet.

The federal Air Traffic Control Procedures Advisory Committee, which advises the FAA, recently persuaded the agency to require air traffic controllers to caution helicopter pilots about flying too close to other aircraft near the airport.

Seeking More Information

But that was before the most recent near-misses. Now, both the Air Line Pilots Assn. and the Helicopter Assn. International, which represents helicopter owners and pilots, are seeking more detailed flight charts for the airspace around major airports to make helicopter takeoff and landing patterns more widely known.

Most airports, including John Wayne and Los Angeles International, have detailed operating regulations which helicopter pilots who use the airports regularly must sign. But those may not be adequate and may not be available to pilots who use the airports infrequently, the pilots association argues.

The two organizations also are urging the FAA to implement a common frequency that all pilots--jetliner and helicopter--can use so that each will be aware of the other’s maneuvers.

Generally, the FAA says its existing regulations are adequate. Its investigation of the John Wayne Airport incident on Jan. 25, for example, concluded that the two aircraft came only within about 500 feet of each other.

In any case, because helicopter landing pads are near the jet runway at John Wayne, helicopters may come within 500 feet of the runway as they circle to land, even under normal conditions, and they are permitted to hover as close as 200 feet to the runway, the agency noted. The landing pad nearest the runway is about 300 feet away.

‘Possible Misinterpretation’

But the FAA said the incident “did bring to light a possible misinterpretation” of the proper takeoff and landing zones, and control tower operators have been cautioned to watch for that possibility.

Sleater said the helicopter came within about 100 to 140 feet of his jetliner, crossing directly over the runway. And he called the FAA’s response “less than satisfactory.”

After the near collision, FAA spokesman Jay Maag said the agency considered prohibiting simultaneous takeoffs and landings involving fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters if they were any closer than 700 feet, a regulation which was later decided to be “too restrictive.”

Denis Horn, operations manager at John Wayne, said pilots may become concerned when they see students performing practice hovering maneuvers near the helicopter training school just west of the main jet runway. But helicopters always remain under the direction of the control tower, he said.

“I think we’re a very active airport, and this imposes requirements for control that a place like Needles doesn’t have. But I think we have an excellent air traffic control facility here,” Horn said. “It only takes one accident to create a calamity, but we have an excellent safety record.”

‘There Was No Conflict’

In the case of the incident reported by the Frontier Airlines pilot, Horn said: “We had a situation where the tower says, ‘I had the airplane under control, I had the helicopter under control, there was no conflict.’ But for some reason, the pilot thought there was.”

Glenn Leister, director of heliports and airways for the helicopter association, said he was unaware of any “particularly serious problem” with flight conflicts. “Any airport that you fly from, there are situations where aircraft overfly other aircraft, simply due to taxiway and runway design,” he said.

But unless there is some kind of emergency, helicopter pilots are careful to avoid runways and passenger loading areas, Leister said. “I think the biggest concern on the part of some of the airline pilots is they’re not sure what the helicopter pilot is going to do. So we recommended that the FAA inform the controllers to make sure that pilots are advised of other traffic,” Leister said.

But Sleater, the Frontier Airlines pilot, said the problem is more widespread than it appears, particularly at John Wayne Airport.

Other Incidents

Sleater said he had two other other problems there in the last few months that he did not report. In one case, a helicopter crossed over the runway in front of him as he was landing, about 1,000 feet away. In the other, just before Christmas, as Sleater was taking off, a helicopter was hovering about 50 feet off the runway in violation of regulations which say there must be a clear zone of at least 200 feet on each side of the runway.

C. Curry Taylor, a Frontier co-pilot who was with Sleater on the Jan. 25 flight, said in a letter to the FAA and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration: “Air traffic control at Santa Ana, as observed on Jan. 25, will most certainly contribute to the occurrence of an aviation tragedy. Something must be done now to preclude such a disaster from ever happening.”