But a growing list of medical specialists are planning their own national dialogue. While regulators such as the NTSB and the Federal Aviation Administration focus on issues of maintenance and safety each time a helicopter crashes, some doctors say that a critical review of helicopter flights from the medical perspective is overdue.
"I'm all for heroes - for the firefighters who climbed up the stairs while the World Trade Center was falling down or anyone else who risks their life to help people," said Dr. Jeffrey P. Salomone, deputy chief of surgery at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, and chairman of an American College of Surgeons committee that considers guidelines for pre-hospital emergency care. "But it's a real tragedy to think someone could die trying to help a patient who didn't have a life-threatening injury to begin with."
"I remember a patient, an 11-year-old boy, who flew in from a motor vehicle accident and was just standing there, and I asked him, 'Are you hurt?' and he looked at me and said no," said Dr. Marc R. Matthews, trauma director of the Maricopa Medical Center in Phoenix.
"It's that kind of laxity that can get people killed," Matthews added. "It's unintentional, of course, but it's dangerous and it needs to stop."
The records of helicopter crashes do not always include detailed medical information, and doctors caution that the complexities of each case often are not apparent from the paperwork. Police accounts of the fatal collision of two helicopters in Flagstaff, Ariz., in June, for instance, do not reveal that one of the patients onboard, a firefighter bitten by a spider, was apparently in anaphylactic shock, a condition that can be quickly fatal without advanced care.
But the records do show that patients sometimes are not in such dire medical condition that a few minutes - or even a few hours - would make a difference.
For example, a 71-year-old man injured in a vehicle rollover in Arkansas last year waited with an ambulance crew for more than an hour before a helicopter came to fly him 35 miles. He died from injuries received when the aircraft crashed soon after takeoff.
In June, a 58-year-old in Huntsville, Texas, with a ruptured aortic aneurysm waited more than two hours for a helicopter to take him to a Houston hospital, 72 miles away. He and three crew members died when the helicopter crashed into the woods two minutes into the flight.
