Commissioner asks for a safety stand down at the Perdido Key helicopter pad

“Aviation is one of the most dangerous businesses in the world,” said Escambia County Commissioner Underhill at this morning’s agenda review. “However, good business practices in aviation have made modern aviation as safe a form of travel as any other. So as long as you’re engaging in aviation, using the best business practices of the industry, you are able to mitigate most of the risk associated with it.”

He went through several concerns that he has about the helicopter pad on top on the Perdido Key Fire Station. The pad is registered as a private or emergency facility, which he said allowed the facility to “avoid a lot of misconceptions associated with a public pad.”

According to Underhill, the landing pad was not registered with the Florida Department of Transportation. He said, “(By) doing so we were able to avoid a lot of the inspections and procedures that are normally associated with a helipad for the purpose of safety. In doing so, we also avoided getting data that could be very useful in a real safety assessment.

Underhill said that there was no evidence of having had a single foreign object debris (FOD) walk down of the pad until today. He described he walk down as “the very most basic form of safety with regard to aviation that is done daily at every aviation facility in the Navy and most in the civilian sector.” The procedure ensures no debris is on the pad that could hinder a take-off or landing.

“Finally, there is no record of any annual structural inspections of the facility whatsoever,” said Underhil. “When a problem is identified in the aviation industry, we do not do a band-aid. We don’t say, oh, yeah, we’ll go ahead and fix that and keep on flying. When a problem is identified, we do what’s called a safety stand down.”

The Board of County Commission will discuss a stand down of the helicopter pad at its meeting tonight. The stand down period will be to determine the overall safety of the pad.

“This stand down will not in any way put any citizens at risk,” said Underhill. “It will not cause a delay in emergency services. It will not change emergency services at all while we do the details that are necessary to make sure that the helicopter pad does not induce risk to the county, that we are aware of.”

He said, “I will be asking for your support for a temporary moratorium with a safety stand down on the helicopter pad.”