And whilst I am on about the regulator, for years the regulator disallowed automation to be used during checks. The autopilot was deemed to be in the mythical state whereby the basic stabilisation, attitude hold, maintaining current heading hold and co-ordinated turn were all functional, but altitude hold, IAS hold, selected heading hold and coupling to nav, ILS, VOR were all deemed inoperative. So all the training was about manual flying, none of it was about correct use of automation. How crazy is that!?
By 2013 in our company, due to a lot of fighting by me and a sensible flight ops inspector, we were eventually allowed to use the automation as intended during checks on the 225 fleet. But it was a major struggle and one which I’m not sure CHC ever fought or won.
So yes the pilots should have monitored airspeed better and should have been coupled to IAS, but their safety net in terms of company SOPs and the culture extant both in the company and the regulator, failed them and their passengers.
Beat me to it!
At the time of the As332L2 introduction - and even the 225 later - the CAA were in the absolute dark ages when it came to policy on the use of automation and FMS in training and testing for RW aircraft, despite an entirely logical and appropriate attitude for FW for many years. Consequently, the associated SOPs were poorly developed and were not actually used during testing/checking, as the pilots were busy hand flying as if they were in an S61!
I well remember seeing the minutes of a meeting of the CAA Training Standards Liaison (with industry heads of training) Group in 2004, when it was stated that the use of ALT hold could be condoned whilst writing down the ATIS! Can you imagine where BA would have been at that time? They certainly didn't have their B777 pilots hand flying approaches and following green needles.
As HC says, it was the lobbying by him and his company, plus the increased exposure of CAA Ops Inspectors to line flying these newer machines, that led to a change in policy. As a UK TRE, introducing the EC155 into service, I wrote to the CAA Head of Training and Standards around 2002 querying this very subject. To this day, I wish I had printed and framed his response. As we were not actually operating under that regulatory environment I carried on and did what I thought was right - and our actual regulator's inspectors, who had purely FW airlines backgrounds, did not bat an eyelid when observing our simulator sessions. To his credit, a few years later he was on the S92 JOEB, and had a 180 degrees change of view.
That said, I am as bemused as anybody as to how there was such a breakdown in monitoring. Regardless of the IAS, there would have been other cues too - pitch attitude, wind noise, rotor noise, 'seat of the pants' rate of descent increase. All in all, very sad.