runningin,
Me too. I work with people who manage to teach me something while learning themselves almost every day. But we are all hamstrung by cost cutting measures as a result of contractual constraints.
All the oil companies want is a bus service (or in this case a SAR service) that runs cheaply and requires little or no commercial maintenance/tweaking. IMHO most of the contracts are stitched up in such a way that they get exactly that, but with a cop out clause that almost always apportions blame on the operator (and the crew in particular) if things go wrong.
With the new QA/SMS policies in place nowadays I wonder how many past accidents/incidents, where they to be objectively reinvestigated, would have commercial pressure as an initial contributory factor ?
Sounds suspiciously like BP want to fund this project in the same way as the bus service, i.e. have their cake and eat it ??
But in this case they can't compromise, or can they ? If they do, who will get the blame if anything bad happens ?
Just a thought
NEO.