helmet fire,
I think we’re mostly on the same wavelength, I’d just like to make two remarks about your description of your decision-making process.
You say you never approach your go/no-go decisions in a gung-ho manner, and I believe you. You have predetermined, hard personal minimums and I believe you. The problem is that not all pilots will always keep to these standards; some are slightly less averse to taking a risk, some honestly believe their skills allow lower minimums, some are weaker personalities and more prone to submit to (often self-imposed) pressure. If your decision-making process were to be formalized and made mandatory for all pilots in your type of operation by including it in the Ops Manual, safety of the operation would be improved.
The biggest problem area, and the one my proposal is aimed at mostly, is the 24-hour VFR EMS operation which is prevalent in the USA. You must have read the NTSB report SASless posted
here it falls squarely in the “going up for a look; stupid but legal” bracket, and shows a depressingly similar sequence of events to other fatal EMS crashes in the USA in the last few years. If this kind of accident could be eliminated – by a system like my proposal or in whatever other way – the EMS fatal accident rate would drop by well over half.