Thought About a Helmet for Flying? Maybe You Should

[Music] i have this thing about helmets i seem to do a lot of stuff that requires helmets like bicycling skydiving motorcycles that sort of thing with that in mind there's a curiosity involved in this photo of me on a harley heritage soft tail my pain facial expression tells you that well this is not my regular ride i was on it because i was shooting a freelance video that required me to write it it's not my helmet either because if it were you wouldn't see my face this is how i like to style when i'm riding seriously anyway so helmets for all these risky things but when i fly an airplane no helmet and not many people i know wear helmets when flying either so what's up with that it's not like you can't buy a helmet designed for flying tons of them out there and it's not like they don't provide protection in an accident because they certainly do maybe a little maybe a lot for me personally and to be honest i just hadn't thought much about it until i saw this video posted by a pilot who crashed high in the austrian alps last year put a link down in the description he was wearing a helmet and may have figured in his survival but he still suffered facial injuries but the big reason for not wearing a helmet brings me back to this photo in non-helmet states cruiser riders often skip the helmet and if you see one at all it's usually an open face design why harley riders just don't look right with a full face helmet it's tradition and you may remember what famed baseball empresario bill beck said about tradition it's a dead stinking albatross hung around the neck of progress but let's not get carried away you wouldn't wear a helmet in a car at least i wouldn't so why in an airplane part of it has to do with the risk of a crash and part of it with the consequences of a crash in other words crash worthiness or lack thereof let's take a little tour of my cub when it was built in 1938 crash worthiness was a word yet to be invented so safety features weren't even an afterthought for example the 12 gallon gas tank is right in the cabin between the front seat and the engine firewall it's not quite in the passenger's lap but it's close the instrument panel is 18 inches away from the front passenger if the original had seat belts it surely did not have shoulder harnesses seat belts weren't required in aircraft until 1951. this truss work in the overhead of the cub carries the fuselage and wing loads and in many crashes it has a nasty tendency to fold down into the cabin squashing the occupants aircraft built through the 1960s and 1970s were better but not much single diagonal shoulder harnesses for the front seats appeared in the late 1970s by the 1990s 26 g energy absorbing seats became common with more cabin flail space four point harnesses and later seat belts with airbags improved crash survival still to this day the majority of general aviation is not impressively crash-worthy at least not like your car which is likely to have multiple airbags reinforced doors and energy absorbing crumple zones since i'm a numbers guy let me glaze your eyes for a minute comparing car motorcycle and airplane safety it's not so much apples and oranges as apples and 10 millimeter wrenches like the one that's always missing when you desperately need it the rational way to do this is by a rate-based comparison on accidents per number of registered vehicles so for cars just in terms of raw bodies it's 11.9 deaths per 100 000 registered vehicles motorcycles are about 58 and g airplanes 127 per hundred thousand vehicles injury data is harder to compare but we know that about 65 percent of ga accidents cause injury or death so probably those numbers aren't large enough to make you wet your pants with fear and anyway if you're like me you're pretty sure you're not going to get in an accident anyway so why worry about it right maybe but if you were thinking flying a light airplane isn't as risky as driving your car you're diluting yourself by a factor of 10. are motorcycles too crazy for you your airplane is twice as bad the general aviation industry hasn't spent the kind of money on designs to minimize injury that the automotive industry has nor has it extensively catalogued the sorts of injuries that happen in survivable crashes still that's not to say nothing has been done there is some data out there describing ga crash injuries and it helps paint a picture of how you're likely to get hurt in an accident and what's likely to kill you this study for example revealed that fractured ribs are a common crashed injury some of these are probably caused by single diagonal shoulder harnesses that provide minimal restraint or by striking the control yoke on impact next up are skull and facial bone injuries these aren't hard to figure out either this study done way back in 1966 found that the instrument panel in the typical airplane of the day was a lethal obstacle in a crash this was in those heavy days of freedom and self-determination before shoulder harnesses were introduced these injuries are often called flail injuries meaning that when an airplane hit something unyielding the pilot and occupants flailed around striking the panel the control yokes are sticks these injuries still occur in fact they're quite common and that was the case in this spectacular accident that happened in california earlier this year it got a lot of notice because the aircraft with the cessna 172 landed on a road outside the whiteman airport boundary after an engine failure that road is adjacent to an active rail line and during the landing the airplane clipped a railroad cross arm that caused it to impact on the tracks this wreck turned out to be the very definition of a bad day turned worse when a commuter train bore down on the wreckage with the pilot still trapped inside but some fast axing and gutsy la cops pulled the pilot clear of the wreckage just seconds before it was obliterated by the train in this jumbled video image you can clearly see that the pilot sustained facial injuries that are typical of flail injuries from hitting the panel an a-pillar or controls facial injuries are often what are called orbital fractures that's the bony socket around the eyeball obviously you'd like to prevent such a painful thing but can you and would a helmet help there's pretty good data to suggest it would but it's hardly bulletproof think of it as more like as additional injury protection in the margin it works the same way that basic safety equipment does like goggles in the workshop or a respirator in a dusty environment you just use it by habit and it confers some benefit here's how that logic works and here's the data behind it alaska has a lot of aviation accidents so in 2009 the faa's regional flight standards investigated 649 accidents with an emphasis on improving crash outcomes you know with the idea of having to pick up fewer bodies with an eye towards survivability surgeons looked at autopsy reports of the 113 people who died in those crashes 97 survivors were seriously injured only 5 percent of the accidents were considered unsurvivable the study reported that helmet use is required for state-operated aircraft in alaska and probably were a factor in reducing deaths and injuries surgeons found 27 autopsy reports that involve serious head injuries and estimated that helmet use could have saved up to 33 lives during the period they study so why don't pilots wear helmets fair question the reasons given in the report were lack of comfort reduced visibility and of course cost helmets aren't cheap although they can cost less than a quality motorcycle helmet but another reason was vanity it's just not cool to wear a helmet and to be honest that would be the main reason i don't wear a helmet i mean it's way cooler to have a concussion and multiple scalp lacerations than to wear a helmet everybody knows this so the alaska study isn't necessarily in depth but it's as good as we've got for proving that helmets do indeed have some safety merit you can scrub backwards here and look again at the accident numbers to decide for yourself if the risk is great enough to justify the cost and whatever discomfort a helmet entails the alaska research however did reveal that government aircraft pilots who regularly wore helmets prefer them over wearing just headsets so that encourages thinking about a helmet is more of an improved platform for a headset than a bulletproof protective device which it is not what the research did not reveal is what kind of helmet to pick as you might suspect there are standards for helmet design including a mil spec for military helmets plus three for motorcycles dot ece 2205 and snell there's no specific standard for light aircraft helmets and the alaska report wasn't granular enough to show that one specific helmet or type of helmet is more protective than another there's too little data to even hazard a guess on this but there are a lot of flight helmets out there across a range of designs some are full of military style helmets popular with civil helicopter pilots and some are similar to open face motorcycle helmets but capable of accommodating the headset these are popular among ultralight and powered parachute flyers who are essentially entirely exposed to the elements with no or minimal windshield given the high likelihood of facial injuries it's logical that a full face helmet would be the best choice then again there's no accident data to tell us if one of those would have prevented these injuries or in fact made cervical injuries more likely in any case a full face helmet is probably neither practical nor comfortable in the typical light aircraft cabin then there's the issue of fitting it with a headset and a mic one company called qh aviation services can fix you up with a kit for a mic and headphones in a full face helmet if that's your desire our sponsor aircraft spruce has a wide range of fight helmets across a spectrum of prices from 300 to 3 000 comtronix dominates this market with about a half dozen models the only thing is because of pandemic supply chain issues you can't get any of them i couldn't even get samples one of the more impressive helmets was this one the lift av-1 nice-looking helmet the company didn't answer emails or phone calls this is the beginning of march hopefully as the supply chain issues sort out they'll answer the phone i didn't intend to make this a helmet comparison video but i did fly with three helmets to get a feel for the possibilities this one is an old standby it's the david clark k10 it's got an inner cloth liner that carries the headset and that snaps into a hard nylon shell it will accept a snap-on visor and the interior has styrene padding that's not quite as encompassing as a typical motorcycle helmet weighs about a pound and a half and retails for 400. think of it as a basic helmet with impact protection mainly for the top of the head a step up is this one it's made by the sky cowboy supply company and comes as either a kit that you can install your own headset in that basic model costs 415. or complete setup with a bose a20 for 1765. it's similar to the k10 but styled on a military tactical helmet with a hard shell and a polystyrene impact liner it's one size fits all and it's available in other colors it also has a nice flip down visor that's a good alternative or even a supplement for sunglasses on a bright day one thing i noticed is how much quieter it is than the headset alone although you have to get the ear cups positioned just right to make that work between the visor and the helmet it really does tamp down the airflow noise yet another step up is this one from bonehead composites actually makes skydiving helmets one of which i happen to have this is the aries flight helmet with an integrated light speed zulu and a flip down visor at three thousand thirty three dollars it's expensive for sure but it's a nicely made helmet with good internal padding and well-made hardware like the thumb knob and friction adjustment for the visor to protect the visor itself it stows under this opaque plastic cover with a tasty skull motif it's more of a motorcycle thing than an airplane thing but i kind of like it for as quiet as the sky cowboy helmet is the aries is even quieter because of its larger size and snug fit my first thought it might be a bit much for the cub but on the other hand why the hell do i care if someone else thinks i'm living out my walter mitty fighter pilot fantasies with a 3 000 helmet and a 75 horsepower engine get your own fantasy but shouldn't include a flight helmet i think it depends on what kind of flying you do if you do utility fines such as glider or banner towing skydiving flights in a single engine airplane pipeline patrol or any flying where you wear a parachute a helmet makes sense it also makes sense in a tandem aircraft where there's less flail space and also if you're flying into unimproved outback airstrips as many people do these days those are the kind of flights where a nose over is likely and having some head protection would be worth the trouble stole competitions are popular and a lot of pilots flying in them are wearing helmets although they aren't required aerobatic pilots typically wear parachutes and many wear these fabric flight helmets these secure a headset against high g maneuvering but provide no impact protection but even in ordinary training flying a helmet could pay off in this accidents for instance investigators found bits of human hair on the door frame pyle wasn't seriously injured but if he had had a helmet it would have been a paint smear instead personally i would not wear a helmet in something like a cirrus or a diamond they have more flail space and usually better seat belts some with airbags speaking of which seat belts especially four-point versions like this are likely to be a much better protective investment than a helmet so i do that first also seat belts with airbags are now retrofittable i'll follow up with a video on seat belts later on meanwhile i'm really thinking about rocking these skull icons maybe get a tattoo to match way less boring than a headset for havoc i'm paul bergerelli thanks for watching

Channel: AVweb

Views: 81,820

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Id: cFbF4bfU_sA

Length: 17min 0sec (1020 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 28 2022