Lori is an EMS helicopter pilot operating out of the University of Pittsburgh medical center in Oakland. She’s an experienced pilot who has been doing this job for over 10 years, doing hundreds of flights every year to rural areas of Western Pennsylvania bringing patients to get treatment at the world-renowned UPMC Hospital. On this day, she arrives for her shift bright and early at 6am ready to go at a moment’s notice.
As soon as she’s grabbed a cup of coffee, an alert comes in from the dispatcher. “We have multiple severe injuries in a multiple vehicle collision on highway 30 near Clinton. I’m sending in the GPS coordinates now, we need an EMS helicopter for the victims as soon as possible!”
Lori grabs her gear and heads out to the helicopter. Upon reaching the helicopter, she does a quick walk around and proceeds to the cockpit for his preflight checks. She grabs her FlySense visor and turns it on. Within seconds the headset boots up. After a 10 second calibration procedure, a couple options pop up. With a quick verbal command, Lori selects a trip planning view and enters in the GPS coordinates on the flight computer.
As she goes through her checklist, the FlySense headset gives pointers on the current state of the helicopter. Today, the helicopter appears to be in fully working condition: it just came back from it’s regular maintenance and there are no problems reported. All told, the assistive system integrated into the helicopter allowed Lori to complete her complete checklist in about half the time it would take here without it, even with her years of experience.
As she starts to take off, a member of the grounds crew sets off her obstacle alarms as he runs across the helipad. She couldn’t even see him herself from her vantage point, so it was a good thing she had full coverage visually and with sound warnings from the Bird’s eye view, which automatically popped up in the takeoff sequence.
Once Lori ascends to 200 feet, she engages the autopilot. This makes his job a lot easier, but her FlySense display is still active on “Heads Up Display” view. This gives her constant updates on her attitude, altitude, and a view of the horizon, even as she goes through a couple low hanging fog banks. It also shows her where other flying vehicles are located and what path to take to her destination all within the HUD mode.
All goes smoothly until Lori has to find a good landing spot. The accident she is responding too has swarms of EMS vehicles around the crash, and a set of power lines and multiple trees are surrounding the area, making it a little tricky to come in. Lori tells the computer “Guide me in the open area between the police car and the fire truck.” Within moments, a guided trajectory comes up in her view. As she descends, she toggles briefly to the Bird’s eye view to check her distance to the power lines, but those are only yellow, without any sound warnings, so she knows she is clear but to stay careful.
As soon as she touches down, her medical crew springs to action and gets 2 patients aboard the helicopter in minutes. They need to make it back to UPMC as soon as they can, since both patients have lost a lot of blood and they only have limited medical resources to cope with that on the helicopter. Lori guides the helicopter backwards outside of the area of trees and power lines, relying heavily on her bird’s eye view to safely extricate her helicopter from the tricky situation, even as the wind starts picking up dramatically. Once safely up and preventing a dangerous crash, Lori guides the helicopter and the patients back to the medical center.
As Lori gets closer to the medical center, there is much more air traffic in the area. She gets warnings and recommended adjustments to her route through the map and path planning interface, with vectors around the display showing the relative positions of other aircraft nearby using ADSB signaling. Lori adjusts the trajectory, slowing down and hovering to allow another helicopter clear out of her approach path at the hospital. It seems like she’s not the only one taking a patients to the hospital for treatment today. Now with a clear path, she can make her approach smoothly and safely, getting the patients directly to the helipad, where medics rush out to give the patients treatment.
