The FAA has selected Sunshine Helicopters in Maui for a new Safety Management System (SMS) program study designed to accident-proof tourist sight-seeing operations. SMS is, according to the FAA, a safety culture that starts with training but also incorporates the acquisition of safer equipment. Sunshine will be acquiring a fleet of EC130B-4 helicopters with less vulnerable fenestron tail rotors. The fenestron is a shrouded and encased tail rotor that "lives" within the helicopter's tail-boom. It's been well-known for years that a tail rotor sitting exposed at the end of its long moment arm is vulnerable to bird, tree and ground strikes. They also incorporate a long tail rotor drive-shaft that can be prone to hangar-bearing failure, gear-box failure and blade linkage failure. The tail-drive is needed to balance the torque of the main rotor. Auto-rotation produces no torque so, during auto-rotation, as long as some forward motion is maintained, no anti-torque is needed to maintain flight during an emergency descent. You do lose yaw control at the cyclic flare, however, so an accident normally results. The only other style of tail-drive is the jet-vectored thrust style... although that's not proven to be as successful as the fenestron. The Hughes (or McDonnell-Douglas) NOTAR are tail-rotorless craft that use vectored exhaust for anti-torque.

Sunshine is one of nine aviation companies involved in the new SMS study. SMS takes a scientific view of aviation risk by assigning a numeric value to the style of operations being undertaken and the equipment in use. The Utopian goal is to "design out" both historically extant and latent causes of human and mechanical failure. The concept's advocates hope to revolutionize the industry's aviation culture by taking a proactive approach to safety, instead of a reactive one. The FAA plan is to roll out a new set of SMS oriented aviation standards and goals by 2009.