Cargo Cult, et al,
There seems to be some misunderstanding on how the UN and NGO community react to disasters and what the processes are in contracting aircraft in any given relief effort.
The principal users of air support are UNDPKO and UNWFP, DPKO for peacekeeping and WFP in disaster relief, although the NGO community is becoming a bit more savvy now in soliciting donor funds, the main contractors remain the UN agencies. Having said that, any operator wishing to supply aircraft whenever an emergency breaks out needs to be a registered vendor of the United Nations. For all you that are interested in receiving offers to participate in RFO's go to
www.ungm.org and start the registration process [it will take anywhere from 3-12 months]. Secondly, your company will need to undergo an audit that includes financial scrutiny and operational minimum pre-requisites. Given that UN guidelines for the carriage of UN personnel are equivalent to any 1st world regulations governing charter operations at night or in IMC, nearly all aircraft contracted are twin engine IFR capable ships, and most notably, because of the price these are Russian machines.
Because of the acute shortage in the marketplace of MI17,s, the aircraft of choice in the third world, prices have reached unprecedented levels and are not about to come back down anytime soon, however these remain, even at these levels relatively competitive given their payloads. To stop second guessing on what is actually operating in Pakistan its probably more useful to check out
www.unjlc.org that provides an overview of operations in some of the regions WFP and both UNJLC have a presence. Its mandate is inter-agency coordination and this includes the prioritisation of helo ops. The tragedy of this particular mission, is, as stated, donor fatigue but don't beleive what you hear on the radio, we are funded thro' till the end of November and also have support from the likes of different governments that provide donations of helicopters "in kind". In other words, instead of giving WFP money, they contract aircraft, deploy them, manage them but have WFPHAS do the actual tasking. Moreover,in situations such as this all aicraft, whether they be contracted by IFRC/OXFAM SDC etc all come under the umbrella of the WFP Humanitarian Air Service[HAS] so as to utilise and make the most of available capacity to the common user group.
This does not always work out the way it should as there are on occasion conflicts of interest and in the end every agency is vying for more control over the relief effort through contracting their own assetts. Its a cut throat industry within itself. Brokers are typically responsible for the price wars but have backed off in recent times so the market is steadying, i would like to suggest though that an organisation such as you have mentioned HSF really is a bit of a pipe dream unless you have a conglomerate of operators in a JV or partnership that have very deep pockets to cover the first months of operation untill you get your invoices in and paid.Mobilisation is typically paid up front and then invoices submitted at the completion of the first months operation – ie at the end of every calendar month, therefore days in country are pro-rated on the minimum guaranteed hrs for the first months work. Your best bet as adhoc clients to disaster relief ops is to send in a list of available assets with a brief proposal ie costing on an ACMI basis, inclusive of all incidentals separately ie what you will budget for food/accommodation/transport/communications/management etc and send it on to us here at UNJLC as other operators do and we then fwd the offers to agencies in need of helicopters. Ie just go into
www.unjlc.org and send to relevant section, if you have a spare 747 or IL76 then pass this info to strategic airlift, otherwise send the helo info to the generic address of
[email protected]. This may change in the near future and if it does I will update you.
I hope this is of some use to you and although contracting of singles is rare, we are about to position an additional 4 lamas into Muzzaffarabad to get to the really difficult villages further up the hills in Kashmir purely for long lining work so there is scope for B3’s and L3’s 407 etc for reccon and similar, particularly for NGO’s who do not employ the same criteria for contracting as say DPKO/ICRC and WFP.
Cheers,
Nick