Over the last few days we have seen some startling aviation safety events. A dramatic fire on touchdown on a Frontier Airbus A321 landing in Las Vegas on Tuesday, ended with some fuss but without injury to any of the 197 aboard.

Today, the captain of a Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul to Seattle died shortly after the plane completed the trans-Atlantic crossing and was over eastern Canada. Fifty-nine-year-old, Ilcehin Pehlivan, lost consciousness and could not be revived.

The co-pilot diverted to John F. Kennedy International Airport. Airline spokesperson, Yahya Ustun, said the captain was dead before the plane touched down in New York.

It is unusual for airline pilots to die during commercial flights, but not unprecedented.

In the summer of 2009, Craig Lenell, the 60-year-old captain of a Continental Airlines flight carrying 247 people from Brussels to Newark keeled over at the controls. In 2022, Patrick Ford, a pilot for American’s regional airline, Envoy, collapsed and died shortly after takeoff from Chicago’s O’Hare. These events reinforce the importance of redundancy a major contributor to commercial aviation safety.

The two pilots on your airliner do more than back each other up in the extremely unlikely event that one of them is soon to be dispatched to the great airport in the sky. As retired airline pilot and author, John Nance once told me, two pilots provide “two brains and two sets of eyes.”

This week began with three people dying in the crash of an Air Evac medical helicopter in rural Kentucky. The pilot and two medical personnel were killed when the single-engine Bell 206 crashed about 10 minutes into a flight to pick up a patient. Helicopter medical transport is a big and profitable business in America. Air Evac is part of the private company, Global Medical Response, Inc. of Lewisville, Texas.

Very few of these for-profit companies operate with two pilots. Instead, one person is responsible for taking off and landing, day and night, near urban highrises, at ad hoc landing zones like shopping center parking lots and highway rest areas, often with a self or a company-imposed sense of urgency that can impair judgment.

In Kentucky, National Transportation Safety Board investigator Brian Rayner examined the scene of the crash and told the local news that the helicopter appeared to have impacted a broadcast antenna guy wire while orbiting the field where the patient was to be picked up. The full investigation will take many months.

But what we know already is that emergency medical aviation can’t match the airlines’ safety record for many reasons as I’ve reported in this blog over the years. (See the links below.) Not having “two brains and two sets of eyes” always jumps to the front of my mind when I hear about another medical helicopter disaster.

Two pilots double an air operator’s crew budget, that’s easy to figure out. The benefits, however, are incalculable.