Local law enforcement learns landing zone management

Minutes can count when it comes to the response to an emergency, and a helicopter transport to a medical facility can often buy the precious time needed to save a life.
But landing a helicopter on a landing pad and setting it down as close to the scene of an accident as possible are two very different birds.
Kirk Coussan, program director for Air Evac Lifeteam’s Opelousas office, said, “We will not land at night unless someone on the ground has gone through this training. This is why we host these training events.”
Coussan recently met with the Eunice police and St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Department officials to go over how to get a loading zone set up and landing zone safety in the event of an emergency.
“The fire department is already trained because they are usually the first to the scene,” Coussan said. “It’s about a 12 to 13 minute flight from the Opelousas base to Eunice and from the Kinder base to Eunice.”
“We can land on the road, in a yard or in a field. Some places, like a plowed field that has not seen rain in six months, we can’t land in (because of dust). It’s called brown out.”
Officers watched a short video on helicopter safety. The video included information the helicopter dispatchers would need like the agency placing the call, the patient’s injuries and weight and GPS coordinates, intersections or addresses near the emergency.
The loading zone manager is responsible for checking to see if the approach and landing zone are free of obstructions like power lines, which are one of the most difficult obstructions to see from the air, and the landing zone must be at least 100 feet by 100 feet. The pilot will also do a once-over himself or herself before landing. The helicopters are outfitted with night vision equipment, and spotlights on the ground are not needed for landing the helicopters.
First responders are asked not to approach the helicopter unless told to do so, and if told to do so, they should approach the helicopter from the front or the side, never from the back near the rapidly spinning rear prop. The helicopter team will come to the scene from the helicopter.
“We usually leave the helicopter running at a scene,” Coussan said. “It takes about two minutes to shut it down and seven or eight minutes to crank it back up. We can do a hot shutdown, but doing that cuts the engine life in half. We do shut the helicopter down if we will be at the scene for more than 20 minutes.”