It's part of my job to train hoisting and shorthaul crews on light twins. All police and HEMS crews.
At first JAR isn't JAR in different countries. In some countries like Austria, Germany, Switzerland or the Czech Rep. police work isn't a part of JAR-OPS 3. Therefore the crews and authorities doesn't have much interest in JAR-OPS regulations. The most common reason of this exceptions are the costs. It's absolute ok to give more costs to the civ operators but please not to the public area! And how could i add more stringent rules to police units if in some countries the SAR job (including hoisting) is still done with mil single engine helicopters?
Second, the authorities are allways right and in accordance to JAR-OPS 3 they could allways take their own view to the things. Therefore they can decide what is HEMS, what is SAR, what is police work and under which regulations the operator have to work. And it's simple to cut out the police job from JAR OPS. Just a few words on an official national paper...
Third, in some JAA countries they have not the latest Amd of OPS 3 in use and still operating under Amd.1. And in Amd.1 there was no 3005 (h) Hoist Operation part! This is the situation as example in Germany. Therefore the ADAC doesn't work with hoists under JAA rules and doesn't train his crews "monthly" like MinSelf means. (Any 6 months they have a training). But they are safe, because they have very experienced crews, just a few guys in rotation on each affected base and they do such missions regularly and often. And thats the conditions to make such an operation safe and not any JAR rules. I do not see enough missions to be safe for the most police units.
If we restrict hoist ops to helicopters able to hover on an engine failure why we restrict not the whole flying to this ships? An engine failure during hoisting is a really very difficult situation, but it's the same situation like hovering over a canyon or between high obstacles/buildings, flying into a dense populated city? No more hoisting ops with singles?
Once a helicopter unit (Police or AA) has received a basic HHO course and properly grasped the idea of good hoist husbandry, effective risk mitigation, and good H&S awareness, there is no reason why they shouldn't conduct hoisting ops.
No, not my opinion. Training and real life rescue missions are different things.
If you give a person or a unit a basic HHO course and push them out to real life, than this unfortunate guys are coming under real pressure. Imagine, lot of money burned in the course and equipment, but only limited personal experience. A big pressure will comes up to do such missions. This pressure will affect the decisions made by the crew members and/or the unit commander in an unsafe way. In rescue business we have a lot of accidents due to such pressure. And in relationship to the mission circumstances it is not possible in basic courses to train all the real life circumstances. AND TO STAY CURRENT!!! My experiences are the following: A crew needs some real missions to get the brains clear, to understand and to deal with pressure and mission circumstances, to know the equipment and the limits in real life.
I have seens some units "searching" hard for any possibility to use their new and expensive toys. In one case they used a hoist to lift an uninjured person out from a place not more than 5 safe minutes to go and ordered a second unit helicopter to take a good video for the public of the "rescue".