FlightSafety International (Booth B1417) and air ambulance operator Air Methods (Booth B1016) will add a Level D qualified Airbus EC145 flight simulator at the FlightSafety Learning Center in Denver, Colorado, building off their long-term flight simulation agreement reached in 2014, the companies announced Wednesday at Heli-Expo 2019. “We appreciate the opportunity to expand the services and support we provide to Air Methods at our Denver Center with this new EC145 simulator,” FlightSafety co-CEO David Davenport said.

The new simulator, which is being manufactured at FlightSafety’s simulation facility in Oklahoma and is expected to enter service in early 2020, will replace an EC145 simulator Air Methods pilots have been training on at Metro Aviation in Shreveport, Louisiana. It will be the latest simulator FlightSafety has added since 2018 to its Denver center for the other models of rotorcraft Air Methods operates: Airbus AS350 B3, EC130T2, EC135 and Bell 407GX. In all, Air Methods operates 450 rotor and fixed-wing aircraft from 330 bases in 48 states. FlightSafety provides Air Methods’ fixed-wing simulation training at its learning centers in Wichita, Kansas; Long Beach, California; and Dallas, Texas.

The new simulators along with the December 2018 hiring of vice president of safety Joe Resnik represents an advancement of the company’s focus on safety. “It’s a progression of the foundation we’ve worked to build,” Air Methods chief pilot Raj Helweg told AIN. “It’s not as if we all of the sudden woke up one morning and said, ‘We need to train better or we need to be safer.’ Our basic premise in life, from the operational side, is everybody needs to go home at night.” 

The addition of flight simulation at Air Methods has been a significant addition to its safety culture, Helweg said, but it required FlightSafety to literally create simulators from scratch, because none existed. “The AS350 is a great example,” he said. “They flew the aircraft in a number of different envelopes to reverse engineer the simulator from an aircraft we provided for them. So they actually built all of that for us to create a replication of the aircraft that we can train our pilots on.”

Since initiation of the simulation training, about 85 percent of Air Methods’ rotorcraft pilots have trained on the simulators. “We can really concentrate training on emergency procedures and repetition that we can’t replicate in an aircraft,” Helweg said. “It’s taken our training to a new level of quality.” 

“We can really work to challenge the proficiency of the individual,” Helweg continued. “In a simulator we can make that the most challenging environment for that individual so that if they end up with a situation in real life, well then they’ve already been challenged to the degree that they can be challenged and it’ll be a, hopefully, non-event for them.”