fostaire,
Why not just shut down? This question obviously comes from persons NOT paying the maintenance bills. Turbine cycle retirement, starter/gen wear, 15 minute waiting period before initiating the restart for the reqd TOT drop, hot batteries, and hot starts.
is one side of the calculation which can be used in the Risk Assessment of the practice. The second part of your paragraph
In the scenario first mentioned in this post, this would not have even happened if the crew had secured the doors personally before departure. Our policy is always PIC last in, first out hot or cold. I don't see, given the statistics any safer way.
puts forward an argument for adequate procedures (mitigation) once the practice has been Risk Assessed and found to be necessary.
Look at the post by '800'
Also the term "essential" when in the context of "essential to the safety of the helicopter or of the persons". Some CASA FOI's deem refueling by the pilot with the rotors running not to be essential. As is to say it is an operational convience to not shutdown and not an essential requirement when put in context.
which appears to indicate that the first element is a Risk Assessment to establish whether this activity is "essential to the safety of the helicopter or of the persons". I would agree with '800' in his assessment of the FOI's thought process.
The problem is that, in this thread, there is already an assumption that it is necessary/safe; in my opinion fostaire, your economic factors do not balance the risks in an area where accidents have already occurred. I do however applaud you Risk Assessing the activity, which itself is a giant step beyond the argument that we do it so it must be necessary/safe.
You can rest assured that there has already been a Risk Assessment by a body of professional pilots when they formulated the text of Annex 6 -they (we) couldn't condone the practice. I would also argue that CASA did a similar exercise when they provided their regulations - but in their case the additional knowledge of their State's environment prevented prohibition; they therefore permit the responsible person to Risk Assess and decide. What they were not doing was to provide a
carte blanche acceptance.
One of the issues with a bulletin board like PPrune is that whilst it is read by the professional pilot who feels confident in his/her training, experience and wisdom (a mixture of intelligence and experience), they are seldom persuaded into unsafe practices by the content. However, the same may not be true for the inexperienced, or the pilot in basic training who, because of their experience level, can be persuaded into unsafe practices.
If I wanted to leave a thought for the less experienced to ponder, it would be that the underlying issue here is one of understanding risk; knowing that there have been accidents and that this practice is frowned upon in Commercial Air Transport, try to understand why that is!
Jim