Details Emerging on CA Medevac Chopper Crash; Bystanders Lauded
The Sacramento Bee
(TNS)
Driving away from Sacramento on Highway 50 now you wouldn’t know that days before, for what amounts to a moment in freeway time, the steady traffic stood still.
In that moment, a chain of brake lights in each lane led drivers’ eyes to a pit of flashing lights, just before an empty expanse of road where each car had intended to be but wasn’t. In the eastbound direction, between the queue of cars and congregation of responders, lay a motionless helicopter, not in the sky, but on the ground; not right-side-up but on its roof.
An aircraft used to rescue people from emergencies was causing one.
For the motorists whose commuting fates aligned with the trajectory of the aircraft the crash came from nowhere. In reality, the pilot, paramedic and nurse aboard came from a nearby hospital, which they returned to as patients, not providers; in ambulances of the road, not the air.
A few days have passed since the air ambulance crashed onto the busy freeway and snarled an otherwise ordinary commute, inspiring moments of heroism from ordinary people.
The pilot, Chad Millward, 60, and paramedic, Margaret “DeDe” Davis, 66, survived the initial crash and remain hospitalized at UC Davis Medical Center in critical and stable condition. Susan “Suzie” Smith, 67, a nurse on board, is said to be in critical but unstable condition.
The wreckage has been removed, the freeway flow — such as it is on Highway 50 — has resumed and the questions remain.
Simple ones, such as what happened and why? How?
As do more complex ones without any simple answers, such as: How did a wobbling chopper weave into freeway traffic without hitting a single car? And: How did a potential “mass casualty incident” became another highway clean-up mostly out of sight by rush hour the next morning?
“This should have been a lot worse,” said Sacramento Fire Capt. Justin Sylvia, in an interview.
That’s hard to dispute.
But why wasn’t it?
Mayday
The sun had set and light was fading from a clear sky just after 7 p.m. Monday, conditions typical of early autumn. Into that sky the medical helicopter took off from UC Davis Medical Center.
The Reach Air Medical Services flight had departed Red Bluff earlier that evening and arrived at the hospital after 6:30 p.m., according to FlightAware. Almost 30 minutes later it departed again, this time for Redding, home of the Reach 5 flight operation and some of its crew.
No patient was on board.
About a quarter-mile from the hospital campus, after-work traffic continued along Highway 50 — the corridor leading east from and west to Sacramento — but had diminished from what it had been a couple of hours before.
The stretch of road, from about 39th to 65th Street, runs north of the building rooftop from which the helicopter had ascended, through East Sacramento and past Sacramento State into the foothills. The highway is bounded by neighborhoods and businesses on either side.
Within seconds of the helicopter entering the air, California Highway Patrol received a mayday call from the aircraft, Officer Michael Harper, a spokesperson for the CHP’s South Sacramento office, told reporters.
Dashcam footage from a vehicle driving east on the highway showed a few cars begin to brake as the helicopter entered their field of view and fell toward the freeway.
Seconds later, the helicopter smacked the side of a steep embankment and skidded across four lanes of eastbound traffic, negotiating a soft spot in the traffic west of 59th Street; just north of the hospital, beyond a neighborhood of homes and short of a large cemetery on the other side of the highway.
A white cloud, apparently a built-in safety mechanism to prevent fires after a crash, erupted as the aircraft stopped moving.
It had left the hospital helipad about 30 seconds before.
Video shows one car in the fast lane stopped just short of the helicopter’s path, its right blinker fluttering at the pace of a jolted heartbeat.
The first emergency call came at 7:08 p.m. and rescue efforts began.
“This isn’t like a normal vehicle accident that we run thousands of them a year,” Sylvia said. “This is a definite one-off situation.”
Early callers reported that the helicopter had struck cars, but that proved false. Responders braced for a potential mass casualty incident, Sylvia said, before finding the damage contained to the helicopter and the three air ambulance workers on board.
All hands
A fire engine nearby on an unrelated call arrived first, about two minutes after the first emergency calls. By that time, as described by witnesses and authorities, more than a dozen bystanders had exited their cars on foot toward the helicopter.
An ongoing, yearslong construction project left concrete barriers between the east and west lanes of certain parts of the freeway, with a widened median in between. Lanes of traffic began backing up in both directions, making the site difficult to reach.
The first fire crew on scene, knowing it would take time for other units to arrive, and that the traffic and construction could affect that response, organized help from the people stopped by the crash, Sylvia said.
They helped responders push the overturned helicopter, lifting a part of it that had trapped one of the passengers, who family members later identified as Smith, the flight’s nurse.
Within about 30 minutes of the crash, all three were receiving care en route to the Level I trauma center at the hospital they had just departed, this time as patients.
As of Wednesday, when identities for all three survivors were released, they each remained in critical condition.
One eastbound lane opened a few hours after the crash, and access to that piece of highway was mostly restored by 1:50 a.m., fewer than seven hours after the first emergency call was made.
By morning rush hour, just one lane of traffic was closed. Commuters drove by at a usual pace.
The investigative process
The National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration each are investigating the cause of the crash. Investigations by the former may take a year or two to complete, according to the agency.
But what does that process entail?
Federal investigators typically travel to and collect evidence from the scene of the crash. In this case, to clear the freeway for traffic, California Highway Patrol thoroughly photographed and logged debris and materials from the scene, authorities said. The body of the helicopter was towed away for storage.
From the evidence gathered on-and-off-scene, investigators determine a probable cause and draft a report. When the investigation closes the agency publishes a final report — a public document.
The NTSB did not respond to a request for an estimated timeline of the investigation.
“Every situation is different,” said Hassan Shahidi, president and CEO of Flight Safety Foundation, which includes the Aviation Safety Network. “There’s no common situation. Every accident is unique. This is a unique situation that happened.”
The Airbus H130 helicopter that crashed this week has been in service since July 2021, according to FAA records, and is manufactured in compliance with federal standards.
The single-engine, light utility chopper — sometimes flown for touring and shuttle services — has been involved in more than 100 crashes since 2004, according to the Aviation Safety Network, including those under its affiliated name, the EC130.
An EC130 helicopter operated by Reach Air, after coming into contact with birds, made an emergency landing in December 2022 northwest of Yuba City.
More recently, the pilot of a Reach Air-owned air ambulance flight in June 2024 lost control of the helicopter after being pushed by crosswinds at Barstow-Daggett Airport in Barstow.
No one was hurt in either of those incidents.
In recent years, the number of air ambulance flights coming and going from UC Davis Medical Center, the region’s lone Level I trauma center, has increased from about 1,120 flights in 2022 to about 1,287 flights in 2023, and a few dozen fewer in 2024, according to information from the health care system.
More than a quarter of those flights were operated by Reach Air, more when including Reach affiliates.
Take-off procedures
Pilots have standard procedures for departure, such as taking into account weather, wind, visibility and the direction of flight, Shahidi said. Procedures also exist to address problems in the air.
The helicopter carrying Smith, Millward and Davis hit the ground about 30 seconds after lift off, leaving very little time or ability to diagnose or resolve a problem or malfunction.
“It’s really unclear how much the pilot was able to do to try to troubleshoot this issue of losing power,” Shahidi said. “Clearly it was losing power and came down, and it’s unclear why it was losing power and whether or not the pilot was able to decipher or determine the cause of that.”
Pilots look for a suitable landing space when making an emergency landing, Shahidi said, which would prove difficult given the dense urban setting surrounding UC Davis Medical Center.
“Not being able to speculate, but it appears that (the pilot) avoided the housing area and did land on the highway,” Shahidi said, “so you would assume that he was trying to find a suitable landing spot as much as possible under those circumstances.”
A number of air ambulance crashes, although rare relative to the high number of their flight hours, have occurred throughout recent decades.
Eighty-three helicopter air ambulances crashed in the U.S. from 2010 to 2021, according to a 2024 study in Air Medical Journal, an industry guide. Of those, fewer occurred over the last five years of the study: 36 in 2016-21 compared to 47 in 2010-15.
The Aviation Safety Network has tracked 112 air ambulance crashes globally since 2019, including 48 in the U.S. Of those, 26 resulted in a total of 78 deaths, Shahidi said. About a third of those crashes happened in the process of landing.
More than 226,000 flight hours of air ambulance services took place in 2023 among 1,315 helicopters helping nearly 386,400 patients, according to the 2024 study. That’s a marked increase for an industry that annually grew about 6% on average from 2010 to 2020.
Contextualizing the rate of crashes versus the raw tallies presents more challenges, to say nothing of finding a cause.
Undetermined cause
Depending on the location, air ambulance landings may prove particularly difficult due to the nature of their services, sometimes serving rural communities and landing in areas without established helipads.
“It could be at night, it could be in difficult visibility conditions,” Shahidi said. “The environmental factors are complicated and complex for these air ambulance operations.”
Causes of past helicopter crashes have included pilots losing control of the aircraft, collisions with poles or wires and making contact in the air with birds.
“In this particular case, we don’t know what the cause is … from the video it appears to be from a loss of power, unable to have lift, if you will, to stay in the air,” Shahidi said. “But they’re going to be looking at it very carefully to determine what happened.”
The federal agencies investigating the incident look at available physical evidence, such as the aircraft’s maintenance records and engine, the location and trajectory of the crash. They also, if possible, recover recording devices from the aircraft, such as a flight data recorder.
“That will be very important in the investigation because that’s going to provide a lot more data in terms of what happened,” Shahidi said.
Investigators interview surviving pilots as part of the federal inquiries, meaning that Millward, a CHP veteran of past acclaim — assuming he’s able — may share his account of what happened during the 30 or so seconds between the time the helicopter took off from the hospital and landed on a busy freeway.
Answers you wouldn’t find, to questions you wouldn’t know to ask, if you drove the same route on Highway 50 today.
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