TheFlyingSquirrel:
Has there ever bee a mid-air low level in the Gom between two helis?
My dear boy! For a time we were averaging one mid-air per year in the GOM, a horrible, atrocious rate. A friend of mine who was flying his speed-hobbled 407 got rammed from his 5 o'clock position by a Twinstar whose pilot had his head down, likely fiddling with his...umm, something. Sadly, the Twinstar pilot died. My friend's 407 got mightily chopped up (nose gone- including pedals!, tail boom gone), but miraculously (is there any other word?) he managed to get it down on the water safely.
TCAS (not TCAD for cryin' out loud) is the
single most important safety device to ever come down the pike. But PHI "couldn't afford" to equip all its ships with them. Too expensive! (Tell me "safety" isn't about dollars...go ahead, tell me!)
I know one pilot who had given his wife instructions that if he was ever killed in a mid-air between his non-TCAS-equipped ship and another that she should sue and sue and sue until PHI had no money left to buy anything. And you know what, I don't blame him a bit.
In that non-radar environment where there are so many aircraft flying at the same dang altitudes (read: "low"), the value of TCAS is inestimable...incalculable. Yet the operators resist installing it.
Yeah, what does one mid-air cost?