212man,
Three risks flying offshore: hitting a rig when low level in poor viz IFR, solved by looking at your radar; hitting the ground back at your landbase, solved by the EGPWS showing you the shoreline; hitting the water, EGPWS will turn your primary display red and give you lots of warning. EGPSW has other good functions too, like excessive bank angle at low altitude, etc.
Of course hitting the water used to be avoided in other ways before, like setting a rad alt to get a light and audio, setting the altimeter and watch the clock or ribbon wind down, some EFIS displays have an orange warning bar beside the altimeter ribbon to warn of impending doom, AVAD calls etc. Now with EGPSW if both pilots manage to ignore all those lights, dials, and voices, we can only hope that the EGPWS comes through to save them. Will it or won't it, after all they've ignored all the other signs, what's one more?
Now the EGPSW mapping doesn't give you a lot of other information such as airspace boundaries, it doesn't show rigs unless they are in the database. How do you add an obstacle to the EGPSW database? How current is it. Suppose the rig moves the next day, how many days, weeks, months before the position is updated? What process or procedure do you have for adding obstacles - do you pick up the phone and call Sikorsky? How is the EGPWS database updated and how often?
Even the shi***te little moronic handheld GPS described by Geoffincornwall (maybe not as moronic as a pilot that can't go into the setup menu to turn off the boating alarm) has the ability to maintain a rig location database from your base computer and then display the rig locations accurately on a day to day basis. Perhaps why the Cameroon crowd was fond of it enough not to leave it behind despite all the ADF and VOR receivers installed on the aircraft.
I'm curious to know how you find the spatial orientation in your S92 compared to the information you get from to a handheld Garmin (which in the 296 also has a built in EGPWS function): When you're told to report an airspace boundary are you doing it from the map display or do you have to get all stone-aged and look at a distance on a paper map and then work out a distance in DME or FMS. Also curious when you are flying to a rig how you know where other rigs are in relation to it. I think the only waypoints coming up on your EFIS display are the ones in your active flight plan, not everything in your user database. Does your EGPWS display any obstacles at all for your part of the world?
Like Nick says, the S92 was primarily developed for offshore, these seem like the normal sort of things an offshore pilot would like to see.
charon