With several days of hearings on a planned heliport in Streeterville for Children’s Memorial Hospital wrapped up, state transportation officials debating whether or not to approve the project have their work cut out for them.

There’s no shortage of information to digest: the hospital’s application fills a 5-inch D-ring binder. The Streeterville Organization of Active Residents put together a 3-inch binder’s worth of materials of their own.

That flood of details also brings up some straw men and red herrings that are clouding the real issue: Will this heliport be safe? How do we know?

That’s what residents have been asking for a while, and it’s a fair question.

Children’s has been arguing for a long time that helicopter operations at hospitals are historically safe, and therefore, theirs will be too. Just skim through the headers in the hospital’s heliport application: "Children's Memorial Record Has Been Perfect" and "Illinois Has Had No Helicopter Accidents at Illinois Hospitals" are two that jump out.

Residents are right to point out that this is a spurious argument on the hospital’s part. For the philosophically inclined, it’s an example of poor inductive reasoning.

It’s like me saying, “I haven’t crashed my car in the last year, so it’s safe to say I won’t ever be in a car accident.” Put that way, the argument sounds ridiculous, right?

So we had to shudder when the experts hired by the residents got up there late last month and ran through the accident statistics for the last year. True, 2008 was the worst year for medical helicopter crashes on record.

Patrick Veillette, a corporate pilot SOAR had at the hearings, took pains to read excerpts of the government’s report on an air ambulance that crashed in Aurora last year, bound for Children’s, as if to say: “This helicopter could have just as easily plunged into your $1.2-million, 42nd-floor condominium.”

Another hearing attendee, Patty Frost, showed a television news clip about a Maryland helicopter crash and dwelling on recent headline-grabbing accidents.

You see where this is going, right?

The residents are saying, “Helicopters have crashed in the last year, they are therefore never safe, and therefore, they will inevitably crash in Streeterville.”

Wait, we don’t even have to put words in their mouths.

“The only way to protect those children in your community is to reject this proposal,” said Rick Porter, an attorney with Hinshaw and Culbertson, which SOAR has retained.

Any debate student will tell you this underlying argument is the exact same one Children’s is making, but to the opposite effect. Both arguments are fundamentally flawed.

There’s no doubt that the medical helicopter industry needs a litany of reforms and maybe even more regulation. But those are policy issues over which Children’s and the residents have essentially no control.

Both sides now await the final judgment from the Illinois Department of Transportation, which is expected to be announced in a few months.

What are your thoughts? What kind of information should residents and the hospital be looking for to determine if the helipad is safe?