Staying focussed during low-level flying will help keep you from a wire strike.
Two pilots and two passengers narrowly avoided a wire strike in October 2023 while following the World Jet Boat Marathon.
Flying low and fast in a Robinson R44 over the Waimakariri River, and focussing on the race, the nearly invisible wires caught them by surprise.
The owner of the rotary-wing – medically grounded at the time and sitting in the front passenger seat – says they had only seconds warning to avoid certain death.
“My son and his partner were in the back. She saw spectators on the riverbank and asked him if this was the end of the race.
“He replied, ‘Yes, that’s the finish line’.
“I knew the area and it was the mention of ‘finish line’ that sparked my situational awareness.
“I called to our pilot, ‘Wires here!’.
“We pulled up and three or four seconds later six high voltage lines passed harmlessly beneath us.
“Despite looking pretty damned hard for them after I called wires, I couldn’t see them until they passed under us.
“They were invisible against the background.”
The commercial pilot hired by the owner to follow the jet boats admits he became distracted by the race on the water.
“I was flying too low, and I got complacent.
“I’m lucky to be alive.”
Fatigued and distracted
“You have to be so careful around wires,” says Neil Moore, 10,000 plus air ambulance hours – and now Technical Advisor for the CAA.
“Early in my career, I worked for a couple of ag operators.
“It is generally accepted that wires play havoc with your depth perception against both sky and land backgrounds.
“They might look further away than they are, or a lot closer.
“You have to keep looking at other points in your field of vision such as power poles or pylons to give a more accurate location of the wires.”
Mark Houston, CAA Unmanned Aircraft Inspector and seasoned ag pilot, says the low-level flying environment is unforgiving.
“The damage that a tensile bundle of steel and alloy wire threads will inflict on your thin gauge aluminium or fibreglass/carbon fibre construction is incredible.
“I’ve lost five friends to wires.
“Three of them knew the wires were there.
“It can happen to anyone. I hit a wire while dropping fertiliser.
“It was my 70th flight of the day, six hours in. Conditions were marginal and I pushed for one last flight.
“I was fatigued and distracted.1
“I hit the wire straight on with the propeller.
“It damaged two blades beyond repair. The broken wire ends flailed on strike, slashing both main wheel tyres, puncturing one.
“Somehow, I managed to get it back onto the strip.
“I was so lucky to survive.”
Mark says an old instructor once told him, ‘It’s often the wire you know about that gets you’.
“These are wires you discuss in your briefing, but they appear suddenly during your workday.”
This was the case with the R44 over the Waimakariri River.
The two pilots knew about the wires, and they were even brought up in the morning briefing as a potential hazard.
“It’s not enough to know the wires are there,” says Mark.
“Research shows that nearly half of wire strikes involve wires known to the pilot.2
“Several factors reduce the awareness and mitigation of hazards including sun position, dirty windscreens, and pilot scan.
“This research also says nearly all accidents with wires occurred with unmarked wires.
“And in most cases the pilots were flying too low.”
Wired for distraction
Distraction can be a problem for even the most experienced pilots, says Mark.
“Half of wire strikes in Australia happen to pilots with more than 5000 hours experience.3
Other research shows nearly two thirds of ag operation wire strikes involve pilot distraction.4
Richard Rayward, Airline Flight Examiner and CEO of South Island-based Air Safaris, says pilots need discipline to handle distractions.
“Pilots must monitor and control the aircraft safely to the exclusion of everything else.
“You have to also maintain situational awareness, ignore distractions, and keep track of other traffic.”
Richard says there are two kinds of distractions – immediate distractions which are sudden and unexpected – and the more subtle and gradual developments.
“On any flight, you cannot allow distractions to detract from your awareness of weather or uncommanded altitude gain or loss, for example in wave conditions.
“Filter out unwanted distractions and automatically assess the importance of extraneous factors.
“Decide whether you need to address a distraction then, or at a more appropriate stage of flight.
“Some distractions can be half-noted or ignored when pilots are busy – others not so easily.
“A pilot can ignore someone tapping them on the shoulder and asking, ‘Is that Mount Cook?’.
“Whereas someone having a medical event, or a panic attack, will need urgent attention – always a challenge in a single-pilot operation.
“I’ve had a bird emerge from under the instrument panel and flap around the cabin.
“Once a wasp up the leg of my shorts stung me during take-off.
“Both big distractions!”
“Pilots must monitor and control the aircraft safely to the exclusion of everything else.” Richard Rayward, CEO, Air Safaris. Photo courtesy of Air Safaris.
Sick of distractions
“Several years ago, I was flying a group of deer stalkers up to the Growler airstrip in the upper Rangitata Valley, says Richard Rayward.
“Rather typically, there was a strong nor’west with showers in the valley. Pretty unpleasant conditions on the approach to land downhill into wind on the Growler.
“I was working hard, descending over the Matagouri bushes before touching down.
“Just then, an unfortunate hunter immediately behind me tried to contain violent sickness by cupping his hands over his mouth.
“The result was a whoosh over my head and shoulders, up on to the roof, and all over the windscreen and instrument panel.
“Surprised and half-blinded, I had to ignore the initial event and concentrate on going around.
“As I climbed away bits of half-digested food dropping off the headlining on to my face were not so pleasant!”
Think wires, wires, wires
Neil Moore says in the ‘old days’ they would draw a diagram of the ag block and note the wires.
“We’d stick it to the instrument panel with ‘WIRES!!’ to attract the pilot’s attention during flight.
“You just have to think ‘wires, wires, wires’ the whole time.”
Keith McGregor, industrial pyschologist and formerly of the RNZAF, says pilots can brief passengers about potential hazards, asking those passengers to remind them when they’re approaching those hazards.
“In the case with the jet boats, the pilot could have said to his passengers, ‘There are some power cables in the race area so can I ask you all to say ‘Stay clear of the cables’ once we reach the river?
“Because the pilot has directed them to say this, he would not be offended when they do.”
Mark Houston agrees, saying it’s worth briefing passengers on engine start and on approaching an operating area.
“Engage them to look out and advise any likely hazards.
“Otherwise keep the cockpit sterile of chatter.”
Pilots can aid this process by using apps already on the market allowing them to pinpoint hazards using GPS on a moving map.
The app will then provide a visual and audio alert within a given radius around the hazard.
But the app, of course, cannot alert the pilot to any hazards the pilot did not know about to start with.
Preparation and planning
Scott Griffith, Principal Advisor of the CAA’s Emerging Technologies Programme, (and former RAF pilot) says the key to preflight preparation and planning is visualising the flight before you take off.
“This is called ‘chair’ flying – because it’s done from the comfort of a chair on the ground.
“You imagine yourself flying the sortie from start to finish.
“You ‘see’ all the events you’ll come across and note the actions you need to do.
“The advantage here is that you can imagine the whole flight along with any unusual aspects, such as a wire, to be aware of.”
CAA Principal Advisor of Human Factors, Alaska White, agrees that chair flying can be helpful for pilots of varying experience and says it creates a sense of preparedness. But she says it does have its limitations and should not be relied upon as the only way to avoid distraction.
“Information gets consolidated in long-term memory through rehearsal and practice over time.
“And if you don’t know the hazard is there to start with, you cannot make it part of your chair flying.
Then, once flying, if you’re right into your plan, you’re unprepared for an unexpected event.”
Richard Rayward believes all pilots should be conducting a thorough check for distractions as part of their preflight preparations.
“This will catch an item such as a door not properly closed, or a seatbelt trapped and hanging out of a closed door.
“Once in the air we continue to take steps to reduce distractions.
“In our fixed-wing aircraft on scenic operations, we don’t have the passengers included in the intercom system on headsets.
“Cabin speakers for the pilot-passenger address and in-flight commentary prevents distracting passenger comments through an intercom system.
“In our helicopters, where all passengers wear a headset, we generally just use earmuffs without a mic for children.
“Otherwise, they can be very noisy for the pilot at inopportune times.”
Learning the hard way
The commercial pilot from the jet boat marathon says his near miss with wires has changed how he flies.
“These days, I’ll ask myself what the best approach is to get a job done safely.
“Before entering the low-level environment for spraying or top dressing, I have a thorough check and plan of the area.
“I’ll mark up hazards such as wires on our ag GPS.
“I try to minimise distractions as much as possible. Even if it means isolating my passenger’s audio while I think, or turning down other radio chatter while I think.
“I fly at a height I know to be as safe as possible. Once I am happy then I proceed with caution.
“Unfortunately, it’s taken a near miss like the one over the Waimak to make me a better pilot.
“But I’m glad to still be flying.”
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Footnotes
1 “Pilots shouldn’t be flying if they’re feeling fatigued as this leads to inattentional blindness, attention tunnelling, greater levels of stress, and mentally overloads the pilot,” says Alaska White, CAA Principal Advisor, Human Factors.
2, 3 Flight safety Australia: One strike and you're out(external link)
4 FAA: Wire-Strikes in Agricultural Operations: A Focus Group Study(external link)