Shell, Texaco, and Mobil in Nigeria for years and years did not provide a climate controlled hangar for the engineers to work in....thus night work was unheard of due to the risk of mosquitoes and malaria. When the operations had spare aircraft to provide for dayshift work only....it was grand. But then....for cost considerations....the contracts began to reduce the number of aircraft and greatly reduced the amount of downtime allowed for maintenance reasons. We know the results to that ....the quality of the aircraft went south in a hurry.
Combine that with the operator (in my case Bristow...) stretching the overhaul intervals as much as possible...and it got really interesting. As the aircraft aged....remembering the Bristow aircraft had 37-41,000 hours or so on the 212's.....it seems the interval would be shortened....not extended.
The engineers...as good as they were...could not work miracles. The Bean Counters continued to cut costs...shorten the times allowed for overhauls....trimmed the number of engineers sent in to assist in the overhauls....and down hill it all went.
For crying out loud....Shell would not even repair broken windows in the Crew Room....major expense item I guess.
The blame lies at the feet of management...you cut the standard and the result is the new standard....cut that standard....and again....new but lower standard.
Until pilots got to the point of refusing to fly the machines....and the turnover got to the point they were having problems crewing the operation....no action was taken. Finally, there was a major shift of local management....but those residing in Redhill kept their perks and bonuses.
As Gomex says....deaths are a cost of doing business to the oil company...and we let them get away with it! Who is to blame???