Well said, again, helmet fire, "But the point remains that all those extra dollars could be spent actually making our ops safer, not reducing an already negligible risk exposure to almost zero."
Too bad it is so hard to achieve understanding, helmet fire! You can try with those guys but it won't work - made up minds are too hard to change.
The zero HV helicopter burns more fuel each hour, to the tune of two passengers lost for each 150 NM of cruise relative to its competition, but this is no problem to the guy who pays no bills. It carries around about 1000 horsepower it can only use if an engine quits, at a great cost in engines, gearboxes, shafts, rotors and other expensive hardware, hardware that costs about $2000 per pound to buy, but this is peanuts to the guys who don't care how much it costs. It weighs over 2000 lbs more than its competitors, weight that is actually lost payload, but this is of no significance to the guys who do not care how much it can carry or how much revenue it loses.