Night Watchman,
- No disagreement about pay and terms of service (it might attract the ex-mil pilots who flock to the airlines), but the key difference between the aircraft you use to provide an excellent operational service and the ones the onshore folk use is size. A helicopter with a footprint (and downwash) like a 61 simply wouldn't work as an Air Ambulance in the UK. Smaller helis with the ability to use correspondingly-smaller 2D/4D LS, or hover OGE out-of-wind over a police incident, have equally-correspondingly-small payloads. If you have to take out a police officer, medic or a patient in order to be able to carry a second pilot then you have taken away a huge part of the reason for having the helicopter there in the first place. London HEMS may be able to operate with 2 drivers but it's unlikely they need to carry much fuel. Try the same trick in an area like Yorkshire or the Great North and you have a very short-range asset. Charities don't have the funds to buy too many extra helis to cover the gaps, let alone the extra pilots. BALPA's campaign, if successful, would lead to a reduction in coverage of a valuable emergency asset. Safe, but not much use.
Helicomparator, northseaspray
- Interesting perspective - the implication being that I and my colleagues are selfishly acting as dogs-in-mangers to the youngsters struggling to join the industry, while simultaneously setting the scene for our own untimely demise (and that of our passengers, CAA-agreed and otherwise). Unsurprisingly, I do not concur. I have a healthy sense of my own limitations, perhaps amplified by the fact that I'm the only person aboard the aircraft with a stick/vote. My colleagues and I are, arguably, more likely to take ourselves off flying duty if we think safety is compromised. Interestingly, it could be argued that the advent of 2 pilot ops would actually make onshore ops LESS safe and effective; them-and-us relations twixt drivers and CAA-agreed pax leading to poor CRM environment compared to current practice, aircraft operating closer to the boundaries of the flight envelope...
- As for "the onshore branch of which could be said to have a relatively poor record of late", I can only think of the cooking of an engine in NI over the past couple of years. How does that compare to the 2-pilot N Sea ops (at least one 365 lost) - and are such comparisons valid when factoring-in sortie rates, flying hours and the like?
- Youngsters joining the industry - should charities and police services have to foot the bill for bringing pilots unused to low-level, VFR bad-weather ops up to speed?
My employer, PAS, is the only onshore operator which has actively embraced BALPA. The process has been beneficial, in the past, both to the company and the pilot workforce. However, as mentioned earlier, the union is only as good as its last campaign.
It appears from the preceding correspondence that strong opinions about the onshore industry are held by people who aren't actually currently in that industry. When pilots within that onshore "branch" find their wishes and experience ignored, it should not come as a surprise when they look elsewhere for practical support.