An airport weather monitoring system that was not working the night a deadly helicopter crash happened in Georgetown County is now fixed.
What exactly caused the medical chopper to crash, killing all three members on board is yet to be known, but investigators with the National Transportation and Safety Board said that poor weather conditions may have been a contributing factor.
County officials however said that an outage on the airport's weather monitoring system had nothing to do with it.
"The airport responded by putting out a Notice to Airman (NOTAM) to the FAA and to all pilots that the system was down and it could not be used so it would've played no role because it was officially out of service," said Georgetown Airport manger Richard Westfall.
Westfall explained that the Automated Weather Observing System or AWOS which gives current weather conditions to pilots at the county airport took a direct lightning strike on Aug. 2, a month and a half before the Omniflight chopper crashed causing the system to completely go out.
He added that it's a pilot's responsibility to check with a flight service station to see if there are any changes with an airport's weather alert system. A pilot he said uses the monitoring system to plan his our routes.
Westfall also said that airport officials aren't sure if the crew aboard that chopper was aware that the system wasn't working.
"I can't really say without any doubt today that if the system was working properly that this would not have occurred,” said Ray Funnye, Director of Public Service, “when we received the calls we did the status updates during the repairs and officially the system wasn’t working that night and I suspect that the crew was aware of that and they found other ways of getting information regarding weather conditions in Georgetown.”
The weather system is owned by the SC Division of Aeronautics said Funnye. When the system went down the division was notified which then told it’s airmen to alert the pilots that it wasn’t working.
According to a preliminary report the three people—a pilot paramedic and a nurse were going to return to Conway Horry Airport after dropping off a patient at the Medical University of South Carolina but because of bad weather conditions the crew re-directed to Georgetown County Airport instead.
Westfall also said that because the weather observing system had catastrophic damage is why the repairs took a month and half to complete.
The investigation into what led to the crash may take up to one year before what caused the deadly wreck is known.
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement