Mission - With the ultimate intent of significantly improving helicopter safety, create partnerships with any region in the world that operates a significant number of helicopters, that posses a credible set of accident reports, that is willing to participate in the IHST process of identifying safety improvement strategies and that will enthuastically follow-through on implementing these strategies.

Vision - Long term helicopter accident rates have remained unacceptably high and trends have not shown significant improvement in the last 20 years on a worldwide basis. The persistence of this issue and the need to improve this record was the central theme of the International Helicopter Safety Symposium (IHSS) in Montreal, Canada in September 2005. A call to action was unanimously accepted by those in attendance at IHSS 2005, indicating that the helicopter community at large recognized that improvement was necessary and that it was ready to accept the challenge to improve the safety of helicopter operations. Thus, the International Helicopter Safety Team (IHST) was formed to lead a government and industry cooperative effort to address the factors that were affecting the unacceptable accident rate. Great strides had recently been made by the Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST) to substantially reduce the worldwide fatal accident rate in the commercial air carrier community. This motivated the IHST to adapt the process developed by CAST and to set an aggressive goal for reduction of the worldwide helicopter accident rate. The process used by CAST was directly linked to real accident data, used a broad spectrum of industry experts to analyze it and had objective success measurements to ensure that the actions taken were having the desired effect. So too, will the IHST's process.

Goal - The IHST has set an aggressive goal of reducing the worldwide civil and military helicopter accident rates by 80% in 10 years.