Flying at Night
I started a thread about 3 years ago, discussing the perceived increased dangers of flying at night and did other forum users consider those risks to be acceptable for revenue passenger flights offshore. I would say that the general opinion was 'Yes' if done correctly, and with a well trained crew, night flying was no different to flying by day, just an extra level of care to be taken.
As I say, 3 years later and we seem to be having a spate of offshore accidents, all of which (and I'm afraid I don't have any statistics on front of me to back this up) seem to have an night time element. Within a year of my original discussion we had the tragic Morcombe Bay crash, then the Jigsaw SAR machine ditched in Den Helder. I believe there was a mysterious ditching in Nigeria with the loss of those on board, then recently we have had Abu Dahbi (OK, some well recognised problems there) and the Dubai 212 incident, both in the last month or so.
None of these accident reports have so far been released so I know I'm going to get jumped on, but Morcombe Bay looks like a good, competent crew losing visual references at night. Jigsaw has not been fully explained but I certainly heard that a few fingers were being unfairly pointed at the crew quite early on, and I wonder if it being night time added an element of confusion and was a factor in their decision to ditch - Obviously not many of us would make a conscious decision to ditch at night, so I've no doubt that the crew felt they had a real problem and had little choice. The two Middle East accidents , one looks like an inexperienced pilot and the other is so far without explanation but if there is any early hypothesis, it would be that the aircraft drifted backwards and clipped its tail rotor on a crane - Yes, hypothesis and assumption I know.
Couple all of these with the high profile onshore accidents. The Russian Oil Exec down in Bournemouth, Mathew Harding (OK, both quite a few years ago now), Philip Carter and family last year - All of which were headline news, all at night, with the aircraft seemingly perfectly serviceable. The last report not officially released yet. I know there is a thread running about Medevac operations in the States at night after the S-76 crash last month.
No doubt, someone will blow my argument away with statistics, but I measure these against a backdrop of other accidents and I really don't know of many accidents by day. Yes onshore, Colin McRae's terrible accident made headline news and is unexplained. Offshore, I know of a couple of fatal accidents at night going back, but I can't really think of many by day at all, and if you think of incidents like the Bristow Helicopter that got struck by lightning and made a successful autorotative ditching, the odds of that being so successful by night are practically zero.
I wish I had some accurate statistics to back up my argument here, but it seems to me that night flying accounts for less than 5% of annual flying hours, but at that same time seems to play a large part in over 70% of offshore accidents. Surely we can't keep pretending that we are offering our clients and passengers the same level of safety by night that they get during the day ???