As former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once notoriously observed, there are two kinds of unknowns: known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. If you are a helicopter operator who employs pilots to fly your aircraft, you have a lot of known unknowns. You know that your pilots are flying from point A to point B at some altitude, along some route, and at some level of compliance with the flight manual. What exactly those altitudes, routes, and levels of compliance are, are unknowns — unless you have flight data monitoring (FDM) equipment to tell you. Then those known unknowns become knowns, and what you learn might sur- prise you. There are a lot of benefits to be gained from turning known unknowns into knowns. If you know that pilots are con- sistently flying too low or aggressively, you can address those practices before they result in an accident or excessive component wear. Alternately, if you know that a pilot really was flying responsibly, you can use your evidence to disprove noise complaints or allegations of recklessness. For most operators who imple- ment FDM, straightforward known unknowns like these are usually their primary focus. Once they’ve implemented a proactive FDM program, however, many operators find that having a record of every flight is also invaluable for discovering unknown unknowns — “the ones we don’t know we don’t know,” as Rumsfeld put it. And, in aviation as well as geopolitics, it’s the unknown unknowns that tend to be the difficult ones. Take a recent example from Fort McMurray, Alberta-based Phoenix Heli-Flight, whose president, Paul Spring, has been one of the heli- copter industry’s earliest adopters and most vocal champions of FDM. Two Phoenix Heli-Flight pilots aborted a night flight in an Airbus Helicopters EC135 when they noticed in flight that the rotor tachometer had failed. When questioned the next day, the pilots were certain that the tach had been working on takeoff. Cockpit video showed that the pilots had called it out as functioning on their pre-takeoff check- list — but incorrectly, as the tach had actually failed its startup self-test due to a simple electronic glitch. recording Issues Helicopter flight data monitoring systems are now more capable and versatile than ever. Why has the industry been so slow By Elan Head to embrace them? 88 Ver tical Maga zine