Tier A
Investigation authorities, regulators, police, coroners, courts, workplace-safety bodies and official avalanche organizations.
Incident archive methodology and coverage
The long-term ambition is every known heli-ski-related accident. The defensible public claim today is narrower: all publicly verifiable cases within our documented coverage.
What is included
Commercial heli-skiing, heli-boarding and documented heli-assisted ski touring from 1950 onward are systematically researched. Aviation accidents and serious incidents, rotor-running ground events, fatal or serious avalanche events, serious falls and collisions, crevasse or tree-well events, verifiable activity-linked medical deaths, and authoritative safety-value near misses can qualify.
What is excluded
Unrelated recreational skiing, unsubstantiated forum or social reports, minor injuries without lasting safety value, private flights without a verified commercial connection, unrelated rescue missions and speculative heli-ski links are excluded. Excluded candidates remain private with a reason so they are not repeatedly researched.
Evidence and publication threshold
Tier B
Operators, flight operators, manufacturers and professional industry organizations.
Tier C
Established independent local, aviation-trade and specialist journalism.
Tier D
Forums, social media, personal blogs and unverified accounts; discovery leads only.
A public record needs one relevant Tier A source, or two independent credible Tier B/C sources with a visible reported/corroborated label. Every material summary statement must map to evidence; unresolved conflicts in core date, place, activity or outcome block publication. Tier D can never establish a public fact by itself.
Coverage ledger
Completeness is measured in coverage cells: jurisdiction × period × source family × query method. “Complete” is reserved for a bounded source enumeration. A general web search can be partial or substantial, never proof that zero returned results means zero incidents.
0Complete
0Substantial
0Partial
0Not yet reviewed
0Source unavailable
No coverage cells have been published yet.
This is an explicit coverage gap, not evidence that no incidents exist. Internal scans remain private until their scope and limitations are reviewed.
Deduplication
Candidates are compared in order by investigation ID; registration and date; operator, date and location; date range, geography, aircraft and people outcome; then narrative similarity. Only high-confidence deterministic matches can merge automatically. Uncertain pairs require editorial review, and merges are audited and reversible.
Unknowns and changing records
Unknown remains unknown. Initial, preliminary, under-investigation, final and closed records are labeled separately. Official findings appear only after the responsible authority publishes them. Material updates revise the same canonical incident and add a public revision; they do not create a duplicate.
People, corrections and reply
Victims are not named by default and require separate ethical and legal review. Materially named parties may reply. Corrections are assessed against sources and shown in revision history. Contact the editorial desk.
How AI is used
AI assists multilingual discovery, source comparison, structured extraction, deduplication suggestions and draft preparation. It may abstain when public evidence is insufficient. Candidates, evidence and exclusions remain private. High-risk publication is gated by source, claim, policy and human-review controls; AI cannot invent missing facts or bypass the incident kill switch.