It is the world’s best-selling civilian helicopter, a top choice among flight schools, sightseeing companies, police departments and recreational pilots.
It also is exceptionally deadly.
Robinson R44s were involved in 42 fatal crashes in the U.S. from 2006 to 2016, more than any other civilian helicopter, according to a Times analysis of National Transportation Safety Board accident reports.
That translates to 1.6 deadly accidents per 100,000 hours flown — a rate nearly 50% higher than any other of the dozen most common civilian models whose flight hours are tracked by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Robinson points out that the flight hours reported to the FAA are likely undercounted (e.g., if an owner/operator gets sick of onerous annual surveys and tosses them into recycling… not that I know of anyone that irresponsible…)
I’m not surprised that an owner-flown $400,000 R44 is twice as likely to be involved in a fatal accident than a professionally-flown $3 million Airbus AStar.
Having been an instructor in the Robinson R22, however, I’m shocked that the fatal accident rate for this $200,000-ish (rebuilt) flight school mule is comparable to that of a $3+ million Bell 407 (i.e., less than half the rate for the much-more-forgiving R44). I guess this shows the advantage of being in the training environment, in which encountering bad weather is much less likely than when an aircraft is used for transportation. Alternatively, you could say that this shows the safety advantage of a two-pilot crew. A higher percentage of R22 hours are student and instructor rather than a single pilot. (The Schweizer 269‘s accident rate is even lower; this is a machine that is essentially exclusively used for training.)
Here’s a cited accident that would have been much less likely to occur with two pilots on board:
Take the case of Jim Bechler, an Orange County attorney who had piloted Robinson helicopters for more than 30 years and bought a new R44 in 2008. He was flying home from a business meeting near Temecula when he stopped to refuel at Corona Municipal Airport.
Minutes later, as the helicopter lifted off with 40 gallons of fuel in its tanks, its rotor blades clipped a metal canopy over the fuel island. The R44 flailed briefly, dropped a few feet to the pavement and burst into flames.
(This also shows the tragic backwardness of certified human-occupied aircraft compared to $500 drones. A consumer drone wouldn’t fly itself into an obstacle as described above.)
Given the numbers, the LA Times could have cast the story as “local company makes an inexpensive helicopter that is remarkably safe when flown by two pilots”. The story’s focus on mast bumping does not make sense. The statistics in the article show that the Bell 206, which has a two-bladed rotor system subject to mast bumping, has a lower rate of fatal accidents than the Bell 407, whose 4-bladed rotor system isn’t at risk.
Personally I would like to see robot copilots for both helicopters and airplanes.
One of the major issues with the Robinson helicopters was a fuel tank highly prone to rupturing and catching fire if the ‘copter landed hard or crashed. The company’s original solution was for all occupants to wear a “fire-retardant Nomex flight suit”. Clearly, they knew there was a problem.
J: That’s also, unfortunately, true of multi-million dollar Eurocopters. See https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/02/22/ntsb-report-available-on-the-grand-canyon-helicopter-crash/ for example. Most R44s were converted to the bladder tanks some years ago. I don’t think it is reasonable for a newspaper to describe the R44 as unsafe right now because of a lack of bladder tanks that hasn’t been an issue since 2009.
The reporter seemed to be upset that the owners of R44’s had to pay for their own safety upgrades such as tank bladders. He also appears to think that Robinson should pay millions of $ in damages to the estates of high income individuals who fly their Robinson helicopters into metal objects, put their Robinsons into low-G situations and fail to follow the correct recovery procedures, etc.
An R44 has a 250 hp engine and seats 4 so it is the helicopter equivalent of a family sedan (except that it weighs about 1/2 as much – thus has less materials) , but it sells for supercar prices. Presumably a big chunk of this is paying for all the lawyers as they constantly get sued and sometimes lose. I think that they should sell two versions of the R44. In the “lite” version ($200,000) you (on behalf of yourself and your heirs) would waive your right to sue Robinson for any reason and would agree to pay for your own safety upgrades if you chose to install them. The “deluxe” version ($600,000) would come with an insurance policy that would take care of your family should you do something really stupid and Robinson would agree to make future safety improvements at no additional cost to the purchasers of the deluxe model.
Related: in 2010 while deciding a DA40 was fun+safe enough, I gathered these fatal-accidents/100k-hr stats from various sources (I don’t vouch for their accuracy):
general aviation: 1.2
helicopter multi: 0.56
helicopter turbine (1996-2000): 1.2
helicopter turbine (2008+): 0.56
helicopter piston (1996-2000): 2.44
helicopter piston (2008+): 1.34
PC12: 0.22
PA46: 1.86
CE208: 0.73
TBM: 1.15
DA40: 0.35
DA42: 0.54
PArcher: 1.06
M20: 1.14
A36: 1.81
C172: 0.45
C182: 0.69
C210P: 2.33
Malibu: 2.04
SR22: 1.6
Light Jets (single vs. dual pilot = 13x fatalities)
Citation II (single pilot): 0.34
Beech 400A: 0.08
Lear 31A: 0.0
How much of these difference is driven by differences in the inherent safety of the aircraft itself vs. the quality/experience/training of the pilots?
According to some statistics, 80% of aircraft accidents are attributable to pilot error. Some aircraft might have very low accident rates because they are flow mainly by very experienced or professional pilots but YOUR accident rate might be much higher because it is “too much” airplane for your level of skill and competence. So these stats are fairly worthless as a guide unless they could be corrected for level of pilot skill and matched to your own.
That being said, there must be real differences in the inherent safety of different models of aircraft but they must appear mainly as noise against the overwhelming din of pilot error. And often the crash rate of certain aircraft (e.g. Cirrus) goes way down after the manufacturer institutes better training even though no physical change has been made to the aircraft.