Thanks Mars - I know the 2003 rate in GoM is greater than the N.Sea - that is after all what started this thread. However this higher rate is a very recent development.
To my knowledge the machinery, operating conditions and contracts have not changed significantly and so any root cause analysis will not identify a smoking gun - hence the present response from the regulator.
Accidents tend to be pretty much like buses, you stand around for a long time waiting and then a couple come along at once. In the case of buses its bad organisation, in the case of accidents which have any element of randomness its just luck.
From a pilot's viewpoint all accidents have a cause and so can be avoided, from a statisticians viewpoint that cause is largely irrelevant, pilots will lose control, winds will blow, parts will break etc. Pilots don't want to be in accidents, others accept that they will happen, the rates simply have to be kept at acceptable rates. The recent rate obviously isn't - but leaping onto your favourite hobby horse and assigning that as the cause is going to achieve nothing. I would be amazed if the FAA were not quietly reviewing all these accidents and attempting to find common causative elements - those are likely to be experience, weather limits, workload. They are not going to justify IFR twins and all that otehr sexy hardware.
You will recall I suggested caution with any of the numbers, we (and I cannot say who, but an international risk management and advisory consultancy) have looked in detail at OGP versus CAA figures for the N.Sea - there are significant differences and it is a shame that FAA/NTSB figures cannot be used to 'validate' OGP's GoM data in a similar way - because I suspect there is a significant level of optimism in their (OGP) data.
Nonetheless the argument still holds that in the right environment single engine non-IFR helicopters are safer than complex twins. From the fatal accident rate the critical parameter is how many people are on the helicopter, small helicopters cannot kill many people. From a simple enginering standpoint complex twin engined helicopters still have multiple single point failure modes and require high levels of skill and training - it stands to reason that verus the KISS of a B206 they are unlikely to shine.
The argument for sophisicated aircraft is always difficult to make on this basis, B206 4 passengers, Chinook 44 passengers, A332 18 passengers - so the Chinook needs to be 11 times safer, the 332, 41/2 times to keep the same fatal accident rate as the 206. Which if nothing else suggest fatal accident rates are perhaps not the best way of deciding what type of aircraft to fly. But the impact of a single S76 (full of passengers) crash on N.Sea accident rates in the last 10 years has been enough to show no improvement in that fatal rate, inspite of the number of crashes being an all time low.
I'm always disappointed at how people love the numbers when they support their argument and dismiss they when they don't. Thankfully regulators (and some extent the oil companies) are a little more dispassionate.