Nick - you just can't help yourself can you... Never mind, keep taking the tablets... I would say that RIPS represents a considerable safety hazard as it encourages flight into icing conditions with no requirement for an escape route, when there are a number of single-point failures that require icing conditions to be immediately vacated. Definitely a trap for the unwary.
Hippo - As you know I flew the S61 many years ago but to be honest I can't remember about the icing clearance. You are probably right though, and of course the limited icing clearance for the Super Puma family was a UK thing, not a manufacturer's thing. With the advent of EASA we had a bit of a struggle to explain to the Europeans what it was all about, but were sucessfull eventually.
My snipe at Sikorsky is due to their ongoing refusal to consider having a limited icing clearance for the S92, preferring instead the flaky RIPS that has to be rebooted regularly.
I suppose one can understand why - consider how much cash they get from a customer specifying RIPS versus how much they could get for a piece of paper allowing limited icing flight?
HC