Story ID: 013
Aviation Insurer Develops Low-level Hazard Warning Tool
By: Matt Thurber
Caption: App’s heat map highlights risks in areas where helicopter might fly
Word Count: 1083
After the fatal crash of an MD 369FF into a slackline strung across a canyon at 600 feet agl on January 2, killing the four occupants, questions were raised about why the helicopter’s pilot might not have been aware of a notam highlighting the slackline’s location. Team members at underwriter Class A Insurance couldn’t help thinking about the notam problem, especially because one of them was a personal friend of the deceased helicopter pilot.
“He was a good pilot,” said Robin Graham, Class A’s head of underwriting, “and that should have never happened.” Graham called chief technology officer Shayne O’Sullivan, and they wondered whether Class A could build a tool to help prevent accidents by making pilots more easily aware of critical notams.
The problem with this particular slackline notam, which the people who installed the slackline dutifully filed, is that notams have to be pinned to a geographical location, usually an airport. The nearest was Arizona’s Superior Municipal Airport (E81), which is 3 nm north of the slackline location. “The notam was active between Dec. 26, 2025, and Jan. 6, 2026,” according to the NTSB.
Unfortunately, unless the pilot performed a preflight briefing that included that airport, he likely would not have seen that notam. He would have had to brief a flight plan that was near enough to E81 for its notams to be included, but if he just checked notams for his departure airport, the E81 notam would not have been presented to him.
Another pilot likely missed that notam as well, because the NTSB preliminary report noted: “According to first responders, about an hour after the accident, a second helicopter flying a similar flight path flew about 10 feet under the signalization line, which had remained suspended after the accident along with portions of the highline/slackline webbing.”
What O’Sullivan and the Class A team came up with was a way for their customers who also have helicopters to conduct a risk assessment for their helicopter flights that captures obscure but critical notams and other hazards. Class A serves the owner-flown high-performance airplane market, mostly single-pilot jets, and the company’s iOS app already helps pilots conduct a risk assessment based on their flight plans.
“We take that flight plan when it comes in,” O’Sullivan said, “and we run our risk analysis on it. Then we can notify the pilot if there’s a risk level that warrants putting something in front of their eyeballs to review.” However, he explained, there is “this fundamental limitation with helicopters, which is virtually no one’s filing a flight plan…they’re just going and flying visuals.”
Lacking a flight plan to run a risk analysis, he wondered how the app could help a helicopter pilot in these circumstances.
The solution turned out to be a relatively simple concept. Knowing the type of helicopter and its range, O’Sullivan designed the risk analysis to start at the helicopter’s location and analyze potential hazards within the possible area that it could fly. “If you’ve got a helicopter on your policy,” he said, “you can just tap and run a full scan…against the universe of risk that may exist for the helicopter before you fly. This little radar icon shows up [on the app] for our policyholders with a helicopter…and you get this analysis.”
The app allows the user to change the location of the risk heat map by starting at the phone’s location, by choosing a starting point, or by dragging a pin on the map to highlight the planned route. “Then we take a large swath of potential range and let’s find any risk within this geospatial area where the helicopter could theoretically fly, and then bubble that up for the pilot,” he said.
An example of the risk heat map is a helicopter at Dallas Executive Airport (KRBD), and the map shows some unlit obstacles near Cedar Hill, so pilots should avoid flying near them, especially if there are low cloud ceilings. “This is a snapshot risk profile for the helicopter,” he said. “This can get refreshed every couple of minutes.”
To help mitigate unusual risks such as the slackline problem, the Class A app doesn’t only rely on notams but also incorporates information from the slackline community. Applying this retroactively to the accident day highlighted that slackline with a red high-risk circle on the app’s heat map. “This is something where if a pilot were flying in that area today, they would see the risk zones displayed to them in this visual manner,” he said.
While the risk heat map is available only to Class A customers, O’Sullivan said, “We have been talking about releasing it to the market in a different fashion. We’re just not there yet.”
For Class A customers who are interested in the risk assessment features, the company isn’t trying to overload them with new procedures, according to O’Sullivan. “Being a pilot, your life’s chock full of procedures, and so we don’t want to be the insurance company that shows up and says, ‘Hey, add this new procedure.’ What we try to do is demonstrate value, and then hopefully from there the pilot says, ‘I find this very valuable, I would like to incorporate this into my procedures.’”
By default, Class A doesn’t overload its customers with notifications of flight risk analyses unless it’s a significantly high-risk situation. However, customers can adjust the level of interaction using the app to whatever suits their comfort level. “We don’t shove it down their throats,” he said, “which most people appreciate. That’s the plan here with the rotor-wing side, to create something that’s as frictionless and as low of an ask as possible; literally just hit one button and you get this in a risk report.”
Later this year, Class A will introduce a corridor feature where the user can view the heat map for a corridor between two points. “That goes a long way,” O’Sullivan said, “because then we no longer have to just search the universe of where they could be, but we search the logical corridor between those two points, and that’s going to yield a much more impactful kind of safety report.”