Today I was reading an article in The Age about the new helipad at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. It said that the helipad built on the roof of the new hospital was insufficient for the hospitals needs, because on hot days (days above 30 degrees Celsius), helicopters may not be able to take off safely from the roof due to the air being too thin. Now I will admit that I know very little about helicopters and their abilities to take off, because I never did get around to properly studying geography, but surely they have worked out a way to hot weather proof them? It turns out that they haven't. A Google search showed me that helicopters in Afghanistan have also crashed due to the same reasons, in fact the article I read in USA Today about the Afghanistan crashes mentions that it is just a fact of life that helicopters are accident prone!
I ask myself, 'Is nobody out there studying how to improve the safety of helicopters? Is it because it would be too expensive to research improved safety, when they work most of the time?' It shouldn't be a money issue because we have money to commission a study into whether a duck's quack actually does echo (A few years ago I read an article about a study that confirmed that a duck's quack does echo, although it is hard to hear due to quality of the original quack), so surely we can spend some money on determining how to improve helicopters to make them less accident prone! Overall I guess I just hope that there is actually someone out there looking into improving the safety of helicopters. I would do it myself, but as you read earlier, I think gravity is covered by studying geography, so I may not be the best candidate!
No comments:
Post a Comment