The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recently drafted and sent to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) numerous recommendations that Safety Board members believe would improve the safety margins for the helicopter emergency medical services (HEMS) industry.

The ten recommendations to the FAA urge better flight training and additional safety equipment for such high-risk operations. One recommendation would require helicopters that are used in emergency medical services transportation to be equipped with autopilots, and that the pilots be trained to use the autopilot if a second pilot is not available.

Cool City Avionics, located in Mineral Wells (Texas) Municipal Airport has introduced an autopilot that H. Wayne Sanderson, vice president for marketing, says fits the bill.

He notified Air Safety Week of the upcoming availability of the first low-cost professional-grade autopilot specifically-designed for use in smaller helicopters of the types used in EMS operations.

He said helicopter autopilots have always been very expensive, typically more than $200,000 installed. "Such an expense has prevented their use in most general aviation helicopters. Our founders recognized the need for a low-cost, light weight, full function, professional grade autopilot and, in 2003, we assembled a team of autopilot industry veterans with more 200 years of experience in the design and manufacture of automatic flight control systems to develop a full line of lightweight flight control products that includes an autopilot costing less than $40,000 installed," Sanderson stated.

The new autopilot is now in TSO and STC certification and the company expects it to be available in the second quarter of 2010. "An aggressive STC program is planned to ensure our autopilots are available as soon as possible for the most popular EMS helicopters," he stated.

The systems will be available in several "building block" variants with 2-3 axis autopilot, 2-3 axis SAS/SCAS and Force Trim (FT) functions. "They have been designed to meet the requirements for IFR certification, with reliability, fail safety and redundancy foremost," said Sanderson.