A rather public debate has been raging all summer up in Ontario with regard to what are safe nighttime operations for the province's HEMS provider Ornge. The fatal nighttime crash in 2013 of one of the Ornge's S-76As while taking off into a "black hole" from its base in Moosonee that killed all four crew members has resulted in a series of reforms.

They include not conducting night operations at some 90 unimproved heliports/helistops located in the province's mostly rural northern areas or only conducting operations there if one of the two pilots aboard has landed there within the last six months.

The black-hole phenomena is used to describe an absence of ambient ground light — our Canadian friends call this "cultural light" — that can lead to pilot spatial disorientation and a subsequent loss of aircraft control or controlled flight into terrain (CFIT). A black hole was cited by investigators as a causal factor in the Moosonee crash.

Canadian regulation mandates two-pilot crews in twin-engine helicopters for nighttime HEMS operations, but four blind eyes are probably marginally less dangerous than two blind eyes. Before the policy change, Ornge used to land at these unlighted helipads by shining a searchlight on a series of reflective cones that marked their perimeters. Pilots doing so likely experienced an adrenaline surge.

Ornge began sending solar lights to the dark helipads in 2014. While that will provide better lighting than the cones, it is not a complete solution to the problems of black holes on the darkest rural Ontario nights.

Predictably, Ornge's new policy has the local gentry up in arms and has generated some scathing stories in the Canadian media about forsaken patients as a result of Ornge's nighttime policy. Ornge insists the policy ensures safety standards.

Ornge also is working to shed some "green" on the problem. Now, two years after the Moosonee crash, Ornge has begun adding night-vision goggles (NVGs) to its helicopters. Wearing NVGs, pilots can discern even faint lighting and darkened ground features as green-colored shapes, and thereby avoid flying into them.

Retrofitting NVGs to an existing fleet, even one as comparatively small as Ornge's, can be a major task and takes time. Equipment must be purchased, manuals must be written and adopted, cockpit lighting requires modification, and crews need to be trained.

NVGs can't provide a total solution in all black-hole scenarios. For that, more advanced forward-looking infrared (FLIR) systems combined with synthetic vision probably is required, and a lot of new-generation avionics have these capabilities built in.

Still, it is a worthwhile and necessary investment. NVGs have been de rigueur on most of the U.S. HEMS fleet for years. They have proven their worth and should be standard equipment for all nighttime HEMS operations.