Heliport safety is an open question
By PETER SACHS
Contributing Reporter
Nov. 26, 2008
(Click here for original article)
Streeterville
The controversy over a planned heliport at Children's Memorial Hospital's future home in Streeterville has been brewing for two years, and could be resolved in early 2009. But the underlying issues-how safe the heliport would be and what duty the hospital has to ensure safe flights-are hardly settled.
Construction on the new hospital began in April, and it is expected to open in 2012.
Children's Memorial has spent tens of thousands of dollars on studies and simulations, but residents and critics remain unconvinced that helicopters could operate safely around Streeterville's tall buildings.
To sort through the growing pile of reports and rebuttals, the Illinois Department of Transportation, which will ultimately approve or reject the heliport, has hired a university professor and a helicopter consultant to review the studies. A public hearing conducted by IDOT, once slated for earlier this month, may not happen until January or February.
"The safety of landing helicopters on this proposed pad, and what impact will wind have, that's the bottom line," said IDOT spokesman Mike Claffey.
Skyline reviewed hundreds of pages of documents related to the project, including some provided by the Streeterville Organization of Active Residents and others obtained from IDOT through a public records request.
Most of the studies have focused on the winds in the area. But pilots said it would be exceptionally rare for a helicopter to crash because of heavy winds, and that a flight operator's level of experience with medical helicopters plays a bigger role in ensuring safety. While helicopter flights, just like any other form of flight, have inherent risks, assuring that operations will always be safe is nearly impossible, pilots said.
"For a community to say that 'I want assurances that all helicopter operations coming in and out of this heliport will be safe,' a blanket statement like that I would consider an unfair criteria to meet," said Nathan Schrock, a 1,000-hour helicopter pilot and the chief instructor at Rotors and Wings Aviation in Kankakee.
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SOAR's biggest concern is whether helicopters can fly safely in the area as they come and go from the heliport, said Patty Frost, the organization's director.
"Do the conditions along the flight paths and at the heliport, could they support safe flight operations?" Frost asked.
Children's Memorial says it has taken added steps to improve safety, like designing a larger-than-required landing pad with dozens of lights and planning for a special weather station pilots could use to get real-time wind and weather updates.
But SOAR says it is also the hospital's responsibility to make sure the flights themselves are safe, even though other companies would operate the helicopters and provide the pilots.
"The argument that 'it's not our responsibility for all these other things' doesn't ring true, because they're the ones that want to construct this in the neighborhood," Frost said.
Then there are issues related to growth in the area. A 1986 plan for a heliport at nearby Northwestern Memorial Hospital was ditched when that hospital said it would only be usable 40 percent of the time.
It is unclear how anyone arrived at that number and Frost said she couldn't find more detailed records. Regardless, SOAR still highlights the number in its opposition to Children's heliport.
"Since that time when wind and weather weren't great, the wind and weather conditions have become more complex because there are more obstructions in the neighborhood," Frost said.
Julie Pesch, a spokeswoman for Children's Memorial, suggested that Northwestern didn't need the heliport because it was close to other hospitals that already had heliports. Children's Memorial, by contrast, is one of the few pediatric hospitals in the state equipped to handle serious trauma cases.
"Heliports at the nation's children's hospitals are almost universally required for the type of children we see here," Pesch said. "It is really imperative for us to have this kind of transport."
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Landing a helicopter amid skyscrapers is much different than flying into an airport with few obstructions and a broad area in which to make emergency landings. Dense neighborhoods have fewer options if an engine should fail. And wind patterns can change constantly.
"Buildings have a large influence on what the wind patterns are, so if you're flying in a canyon of buildings, the conditions there are really specific to those buildings," said Thomas Corke, a faculty chair in the University of Notre Dame's department of aerospace and mechanical engineering hired by SOAR to review the hospital's wind studies.
Wind usually flows in smooth streams, like a straight, wide stretch of a river. But that straight flow becomes more turbulent when wind encounters obstructions like buildings. Visualize water in a river tumbling over and around rocks, forming rapids that bounce rafters around as they travel down the river. Air can behave similarly around large buildings like the John Hancock Tower when winds are heavy.
"It becomes like a wind tunnel," said Sal Fragoso, an 800-hour helicopter pilot at Wings Air near New York City.
But turbulence by itself usually doesn't make flying dangerous, even if passengers find the ride uncomfortable. If pilots know where the wind is coming from, they can anticipate turbulent eddies and steer clear of those areas.
"Once you're familiar with the heliport and the structures around it and exactly how the wind patterns are going to flow, then you know what to expect and how the aircraft is going to react," said Schrock, the Kankakee aviation instructor.
Factors like a pilot's experience, the type of helicopter being flown and weather conditions can also affect the safety of a flight.
"How do you decide on those missions to take?" Fragoso said. "A lot of it is the weather, that's a major deterrent."
Assessing when it's safe to fly and when it's not is a big part of flight training, Fragoso and Schrock said. But Frost suggested that decision shouldn't be left to pilots.
"There are known problems with pilots making decisions in medical helicopter flights," Frost said, pointing to a spike in medical helicopter accidents nationwide in the last year (see accompanying story on facing page). The causes of many of those accidents have not yet been determined.
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The hospital has commissioned two sets of studies, including computerized wind simulations and wind tunnel tests using a scale model of the Streeterville area.
While Pesch, the hospital's spokeswoman, initially said others were better qualified than her to answer questions about the project, she later refused to make those people available for interviews. Calls to the Ontario, Canada, offices of RWDI, which did the wind studies, were returned by Pesch, who works in Chicago.
In an e-mail, Pesch wrote that the reports submitted to IDOT answered all questions and that "understanding of the results does require a degree of professional expertise."
Children's Memorial refused to say how much it spent on the studies. The second round alone cost nearly $60,000, according to a letter to 42nd Ward Alderman Brendan Reilly.
RWDI specializes in how tall buildings respond to wind, but it doesn't list aeronautical wind analyses as one of its specialties on its Web site.
Historical wind data from the former Meigs Field showed winds came from the north, west and south most of the time. That's significant because the tallest buildings near Children's Memorial Hospital-Olympia Center, Water Tower Place and the John Hancock Tower-are all to the west and north. That means whenever the wind blows from those directions, turbulent air can be expected in the area around the hospital.
RWDI's first analysis noted that "some level of turbulence downwind of any tall building can be expected in certain conditions, but is quite manageable."
Pilots agree.
"At those levels of experience, as far as emergency medical service is concerned, we're all trained to deal with wind," Fragoso said. "As you get better, it becomes less and less of an issue."
RWDI's wind tunnel studies have found that helicopters arriving from the east and from the south in those "worst case" wind conditions wouldn't experience severe wind conditions, but critics question those results.
A two-month study in mid-2007 found that almost all of the time, wind speeds near the hospital site were low. But based on such a short period, it would be difficult for anyone to guess what the wind conditions in the area would be during the rest of the year.
Such holes in the wind studies prompted 42nd Ward Alderman Brandon Reilly to ask Children's Memorial to redo some of the wind tests.
The second round of wind studies was completed in August, but Corke and Reilly again expressed concerns with its completeness.
SOAR has relied on Corke and another expert it hired, Gene Doub, to back up its criticisms of the heliport. In letters to the city and IDOT that referred to Corke and Doub, SOAR that "Children's Memorial Hospital has failed to demonstrate the safety of its proposed rooftop heliport."
But Corke said recently that, from his perspective, the heliport's safety is an open question.
"If it was me, I would try to get more information and better information than this to make a judgment if it's safe or not," Corke said, referring to the RWDI studies. "It's not that I'm saying it's unsafe."
IDOT is spending more than $20,000 to have two outside experts review the heliport plan. Michael Selig, a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, declined to comment on his work. Jerry Lay, a career military helicopter pilot and now an aviation consultant, said he is "gathering information."
Claffey, the IDOT spokesman, said the department needs the outside experts because its staff doesn't have the right expertise to review the studies themselves.
"We're getting data and opinions that have competing points of view so we want to make sure we take every step we can to evaluate all the information," Claffey said.
The pilots Skyline interviewed and Frost independently agreed that one thing could make a big difference: a published set of policies and procedures that pilots would have to follow when using the heliport.
"Show us what you're going to do to put safeguards in effect,' said Schrock, the Kankakee flight instructor. "Show us something on paper, show us policies, show us procedures."