USHST Winter 2025 Newsletter

USHST Winter 2025 Newsletter: Launching the USHST Peer Pilot Mental Health Program; USHST Foundation Update

Welcome to the Winter 2025 US Helicopter Safety Team e-newsletter! We sincerely appreciate your time and participation with the US Helicopter Safety Team. If you are first joining us, the USHST is publishing a quarterly eNewsletter, featuring safety tips, statistical data and shared experiences in our community. If you would like to share your experiences…
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Securing Loose Equipment in the Cockpit – A Healthy Obsession

In the mid-1980s, during my first tour as a young and inexperienced US Army AH-1F Cobra pilot in Germany, I went through a near-catastrophic event that forever changed my approach to cockpit safety. It happened during a routine but fun training mission, where I was performing low-level flight maneuvers in a loose trail formation with…
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Commandment #1 Preflight Essay

Early on the morning of December 17, 1903 at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, NC, Orville and Wilbur Wright circled the soon to be famous Wright Flyer. They checked the two 8 ft wooden propellers for nicks, inspected the truss and wing warping wires for fraying and looked for tears in the muslin fabric…
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Inadvertent IMC (IIMC), the Ongoing Threat

Several times in my long flying career I have flown into weather I hadn’t planned on. The discomfort, and fear of each of these varied. The least intrusive was in a King Air 200 one night. The weather was described as marginal VFR. As always I was on an IFR flight plan, and the weather…
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Rotorcraft Accident Dashboard

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USHST Safety Report, Clarke Pleasants

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Flight Simulation Training Device (FSTD) with Extended Reality (XR) Systems

The term XR encompasses: Virtual Reality (VR) – when the environment out the window visual and flight deck is completely represented virtually on a head mounted display (HMD), Augmented Reality (AR) –when the real-world element is enhanced with a virtual overlay component using a see-through HMD, and Mixed Reality (MR) – when the real environment…
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Exploring USHST Peer Pilot Mental Health

If you’ve been paying attention to the mental health conversation in aviation lately, you may have noticed a slight shift in tone. First, let’s back up a bit. As you’re likely aware, several disastrous accidents and incidents related to pilot mental health have occurred in recent years. Often, the knee-jerk reaction was to implement new…
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