Do not forget the LTE folks, even slightly overweight, as bad as it is, may tempt the high time one into the IGE approach, but if you are in the mountains you do not always have the luxury of into the wind, and the cross wind at max all up plus some, at 10000 plus feet plus some, gives you the ideal LTE situation. We have had a couple of those of late and when you chat to the pilots the common denominator is, " I dunno what happened, it just ran away on me", and with a Vortex in the tail rotor no graph in the world is going to help out. Old 206 problem that most times gets swept under the carpet and the driver takes the rap. As for the EC120, dont forget that in thr EC120 VEMD you get the calculation on the screen in front of you and even if the POH was used for emergency toilet paper you still only have to know how the VEMD works and it will tell you what you can and what you can not do. Unfortunately in the 120 the red line is not as wide as in the 206 and that horrible announcement on the VEMD, "Parameter Overlimit" or "Exceedance" tends to make the driver a little more honest than he would have been under the Bell rules. Besides, both the 206 and the 120 are really magic helo's and driven between the correct lines make for really safe ops. I have flown a 120 from France to South Africa, 54 hrs ferry, and can assure you that the numbers in the book are quite conservative,
Cheers
Tusker