There’s been a lot of discussion around takeoff profiles. It’s important to understand that the “performance” profiles are to mitigate the risk following a single engine failure, nothing else. Below TDP the idea is to land safely back on the departure point. If you lose sight of it as soon as you have lifted, due to insufficient lighting, there is little point in planning to carry out the performance profile. That is why there are rules and regulations appertaining to public transport flights regarding minimum pad size and minimum lighting (it appears that this was not such a flight).
Better in cases like this to concentrate on a safe transition from external cues to instruments and accept the possibly far lesser risk of an engine malfunction.
Whether this meets the legal requirements of public transport or not is another matter. In ideal circumstances a flight like this should have been flown from a properly laid out and lit helicopter landing site, but it appears that things had already gone beyond legality at the planning stage for other reasons. Irrespective of that, it could still have been safely flown.
Last edited by ShyTorque; 26th Aug 2020 at 20:23.
Reason: Grammar.