Don’t expect to see federally funded aviation weather cameras in Hawaii or the contiguous U.S. anytime soon. The FAA has opted to analyze more related data and has deferred making a decision on installing weather cameras in those locations until at least 2018, an agency spokesman told AIN. Just last year, the FAA had claimed that a “go” decision on the weather cams was “pending” within months. However, competition for FAA resources, particularly the funding of NextGen air traffic control technology, appears to have put initiatives such as weather cameras on the back burner for now.
The delay in implementing a national weather cam system had previously drawn criticism from the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB had recommended that the FAA draft concrete plans for installing a national weather camera system and noted that the FAA’s initiative was confined to identifying critical installation locations, weather trends and seasonal conditions affecting flight safety.
The deferral decision comes just months after the NTSB’s final report was issued on a fatal November 2011 helicopter tour crash in Hawaii where access to local weather camera images could have made a difference.
That crash, involving a Blue Hawaiian-operated Airbus Helicopters EC130B4, killed five. The NTSB final report on the accident was released on July 25, 2014. It concluded that the accident’s probable cause was “the pilot’s failure to maintain clearance from mountainous terrain while operating in marginal weather conditions, which resulted in the impact of the horizontal stabilizer and lower forward portion of the Fenestron with ground and/or vegetation and led to the separation of the Fenestron and the pilot’s subsequent inability to maintain control. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s decision to operate into an area surrounded by rising terrain, low and possibly descending cloud bases, rain showers and high wind.”
A spate of fatal heli-tour crashes in Hawaii between 2004 and 2007 brought increased criticism of, and scrutiny to, the industry. The NTSB faulted heli-tour operators for inadequately training new-hire pilots on the unique particulars of flying in Hawaii. The NTSB reviewed weather-related accidents since 1994 and found “four involved pilots who were relatively new to air-tour operations in Hawaii, three of whom had been operating for less than two months.” The Board cited the pilots’ inexperience in assessing local weather conditions as a contributing factor and recommended that the FAA develop and require “a cue-based training program for pilots that specifically addresses local weather phenomena and in-flight decision-making.”
Hawaiian air tour operators have been working with the FAA for years to get weather cameras installed at strategic mountain locations there without success. Hawaii’s microclimates are localized and change rapidly, and unforecast weather has been blamed for numerous fixed- and rotary-wing accidents. The NTSB noted several items in its chief investigator’s report on the 2011 Blue Hawaiian crash that touched on the difficulty of obtaining accurate weather information in Hawaii. Particularly telling was the interview of the company’s chief pilot who noted that while the company’s helicopters were fitted with the Garmin G500H system, which can display downloaded weather information, it often had limited utility in Hawaii as airport weather data used for the system was not always applicable. “[He] further mentioned that the company has been trying with the FAA to get weather cameras up along the coastlines of the islands; however, they are having difficulty getting funding. [He] also stressed that the company has limited radio contact with its helicopters because their radios are restricted to line of sight. There is no repeater; therefore, transmitting capabilities are not good,” according to the NTSB report.
The FAA’s own data from Alaska shows that a federally-funded system of 221 aviation weather cameras installed there since 1999 have become a critical aid to flight planning and have enhanced safety. A 2012 FAA survey of Alaska Part 135 operators concluded that weather-cam data has become an integral part of flight planning and go/no-go decision-making. The NTSB credits them with contributing to a 53 percent reduction in weather-related aviation accidents between 2008 and 2011. The cameras also helped cut unnecessary flight hours due to unreliability of weather information by 64 percent.
The FAA Aviation Weather Camera Program Office’s Aviation Weather Cameras website is available at http://avcams.faa.gov. The only cameras on that site are the Alaska cams. There are also a number of aviation weather camera views on the web, maintained by various entities. Blue Hawaiian maintains its own web cams at airports where it operates, although these cameras don’t show off-airport areas where weather has been a problem. n