Some six months ago, I wrote about an investigation that had found the Virve radio system partly responsible for the injuries sustained by three firefighters during an October 2006 fire. Sadly, there is more such news – Virve is now blamed, at least indirectly, also for the death of a fire spotting crew in July 2006.
Finland’s accident investigation board has found that one of the probable reasons for the Cessna 172 crash in July 2006 was that the pilot operated his cell phone while simultaneously trying to make a steep turn at very low altitude. The pilot had previously reported that he was unable to make contact using his Virve unit. He therefore had to place or receive a cell phone call whenever communicating with the emergency response center or with other responding units. This obvious distraction contributed to the crash.
The same incident even involves another case of Virve failure – the helicopter that subsequently found the Cessna wreckage was unable to communicate this to the response leader on the ground by radio. The chopper crew therefore had to land in order to get the message across, after which they lifted off again in order to guide the ground units to the crash location. This Virve problem occurred because the helicopter and the ground crews had no common voice groups to use. – Before this bleak era of Virve, units from different agencies could always communicate simply by using one of the national joint operation channels.
These are not the only failures that make the report such grim reading. As a third example, the 112 operator whom the crash was immediately communicated to chose to write that report off as groundless. This led to a delay of almost three hours before the wreckage was found (not that an appropriate response would have saved the crew, who had died on impact).
I have no doubt that this incident will lead to more shakeups in the emergency response bureaucracy – and that things then will become even worse. The problem is not with one voice group configuration or similar isolated detail, but with local agencies and techniques having been replaced by a system that isolates itself from reality to the point that staff no longer understand that a witnessed aircraft crash is something that has occurred in the real world.
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