Originally Posted by
etudiant
Honestly, this discussion is not confidence building. I'm just SLF, but have been happily freighted around in helicopters in the LA area, as well as around the Hawaiian Islands.
Wonderful experiences, but perhaps I should have been much more skeptical of the capabilities of the service providers.
Certainly GulliBell and SASless both suggest that the standards required are not up to their professional requirements. People have gotten killed as a result.
etudiant, you need to understand that the employer sets the tone of the conduct of operations, not only sets the tone but depending on the company absolutely demands it, good or bad. You can have the very best of crews but it's of little help if the company demands are otherwise.
The company
Gulli and I flew for was at the time the worlds largest company, so had deep, deep pockets, in fact could buy and sell governments. We had an operations manual written by the company that said we would operate to charter standards despite being a private operator, we paid no attention to what was written in the ops manual, if you raised the fact you were told being private we didn't need an ops manual so all was good, in all the years of operation we had never had an accident so we must be doing everything right we were told. As an offshore operator the manual demanded land based alternates for all operations, we had all the weather problems of the North Sea to contend with save for icing. Did we provide for alternates? Hell no, we didn't even get weather reports, having to shut down on a platform because home was fogged in was a regular occurrence. So what you going to do if you had an engine failure prior to the notification of home being fogged in? Seven miles away from home was an airfield with an ILS so if you had the fuel you could do a zero/zero approach and I personally was pretty sure that would turn out OK, had practiced it in the sim, but one gotcha was you may not have had the fuel, for the simple reason that flights were planned to arrive home with just the reserve fuel intact, which negated flying the extra track miles necessary to fly the ILS if the failure occurred after departure from your last platform stop. Woe betide you if you suggested alternative ways of conducting business.
One day three crews used the ILS to extricate themselves from weather, they were admonished and told they should have used the radar to get themselves visual on the coast line. Can remember getting to the coast one day and having to hover taxi to get home.
Another issue was captains were staff and subject to a yearly appraisal for a pay rise, co-pilots were provided by a contractor. Being staff was the one of the cruxs of the problem. Mangers were only in their position for about three years before they were moved on to another position (career advancement), they were given a yearly budget and that was their holy grail, coming in under budget dictated their salary increase, the bigger the gap the bigger the salary increase. No one was going to advocate spending money on infrastructure and blowing out their budget on something that we had operated without for the previous XX years.
The regulator had absolutely no interest, their lawyers going to go toe to toe with the high priced company lawyers? Not a chance.
Dr. Diane Vaughan developed the term "Normalisation of Deviance" to explain the space shuttle Challenger disaster, it has wide applicability where people are seduced into "this is how we do things around here" despite it not being good practice, unsafe, or plain illegal. All the aircrew were so seduced, me included. One saving grace was the top class equipment and excellent maintenance.