We believe that running an incident simulation with your friends, or in your club, is a valuable exercise. It brings people together, while revealing the challenges of accident management in the local area in a safe and controlled environment.
In this pack we have constructed an example scenario based around a paragliding crash. It is by no means prescriptive, so please use any scenario you feel appropriate for your location and your group of practitioners. We would suggest not overcomplicating the medical details, as first aid is only one part of the exercise. Indeed, a good accident simulation should include:
- Approach to the scene
- Group dynamics
- Assessment and treatment
- Casualty evacuation
The pack includes ‘role cards’ for the scenario’s Narrator, Observer, Casualty and Emergency Call Handler, along with some tips on debriefing the exercise.
Please remember that some participants in the simulation may find the experience difficult or traumatic. Please be sensitive to this during the exercise and in the debriefing that follows.
Download the Incident Simulation Pack (PDF).
Why a simulation beats another lecture
Almost every pilot has sat through a safety briefing. Very few have ever stood at the edge of a field, looked at a person lying awkwardly in a harness, and had to decide what to do first. The gap between those two experiences is enormous, and it is the reason we put a simulation pack together rather than writing another set of slides. Knowledge that has never been retrieved under pressure is not reliable knowledge. A simulation forces retrieval: it makes people speak out loud, allocate roles, run out of hands, discover that nobody knows the name of the field they are standing in, and realise how long a helicopter actually takes to arrive.
The other reason is social. Accident management in free flight is almost always done by a group of friends and club members rather than by a trained team, and groups fail in predictable ways. They cluster around the casualty and leave the road unmarked. Everyone assumes someone else has called for help. The most confident voice is followed rather than the most informed one. None of these failures is a knowledge problem, and none of them is fixed by more teaching. They are fixed by having practised together once already.
Setting the scenario up
Keep the medicine simple. The temptation when writing a scenario is to build an interesting casualty — a tension pneumothorax, an occult pelvic bleed, a complicated airway. Resist it. First aid is one part of the exercise and usually the part your group is best at. The parts that fail under pressure are the approach, the communication and the handover, and a complicated injury simply distracts everyone from them.
Run it where you actually fly. A simulation on a clubhouse floor teaches almost nothing about slope, wind, distance from the road or mobile coverage. If you can safely stage the scenario at your own landing field or on the hill, do it — the local detail is the whole point. Tell nearby landowners and any other users of the site what you are doing beforehand, make sure it is obvious to passers-by that the exercise is not real, and never make a live emergency call. Nominate someone to answer the pretend call instead, using the role card in the pack.
Give people jobs. The pack contains role cards for a narrator, an observer, the casualty and an emergency call handler. The narrator supplies the information the environment would supply — what the casualty looks like, what they say, what changes over time. The observer says nothing at all during the exercise and takes notes for the debrief. Casting these roles deliberately, rather than letting them emerge, is what keeps the exercise from collapsing into a discussion.
Running it safely
Do not actually move anyone. Simulated casualties get cold, and simulated rescuers get injured lifting people down slopes. Talk through any manoeuvre that would carry real risk rather than performing it. Equally, do not let the exercise run so long that the casualty is genuinely chilled — twenty to thirty minutes is usually plenty, and the debrief is where most of the learning happens anyway.
Be honest that this material can be difficult. Some of your group will have been at a real accident, and a plausible simulation can bring that back sharply and unexpectedly. Say so at the start, make it explicitly acceptable to step out at any point without explanation, and check in with people afterwards rather than assuming that a cheerful debrief means everyone is fine. A club that handles this well builds trust; a club that runs a realistic scenario without warning can do real harm.
Debriefing well
The debrief is the exercise. Start with the casualty — what was that like from the ground? — because their perspective is usually the most revealing and the least anticipated. Then ask the group what they intended to do, before telling them what they did. The observer's notes come last, framed as observations rather than verdicts.
Aim to leave with three or four concrete changes rather than a general sense of having learned something. Useful outputs from a first simulation are almost always administrative: writing the what3words reference of the landing field on the club noticeboard, agreeing who carries a first aid kit on a club fly-in, deciding that the person who spots an incident is the person who calls rather than the person who reaches the casualty first, and finding out that mobile signal on the west side of the hill is nonexistent. Those small, specific outcomes are worth more than any amount of remembered protocol.
Doing it again
One simulation is worth a great deal. Two is worth more, and the second one is much easier to organise because the club has already accepted the idea. Vary the site, the weather, the time of day and the number of people available — a scenario with two rescuers and no phone signal teaches something completely different from one with a full club and a road fifty metres away. Rotate the roles so that the same confident people are not always in charge, and let less experienced pilots run the incident occasionally; they are the ones most likely to be first on scene at a quiet site.
If your club runs a simulation and learns something we have not thought of, we would like to hear about it. The pack is deliberately not prescriptive, and the most useful improvements to it have come from people who ignored parts of it and told us why.