So there seems to be general agreement, that flying at night is more difficult and therefore riskier than flying by day, and this would presumably account for the considerably higher accident rate that we seem to have for flights in the hours of darkness.
As above, I have always considered night flights as instrument approaches and you can usually get in pretty close to a rig as a 'numbers exercise' and then hopefully it is a case of looking up when you have a fair amount of visual reference with a well trimmed aircraft. Still not easy though, prone to error, making that switch from IFR to VFR, and I pity the poor guys in the S-76. I remember in the late 70's we had single pilot at night in the S-76, trying to do cross-deck landings with the nose 10' up in the air !! I never did that and was quite happy not to have done, but at that time, there was a general shrugging of shoulders and acceptance of 'well, thats what we do'. It took a while for enough grumblings to change the situation and common sense to prevail.
As with this. Anyone who shuts down offshore now is made clearly aware of the safety culture and how safety is now coming first in everything we are doing in this industry. I'm pretty confident that the Oil management that call up these flights have no real concept of the difference between daylight and night flying, they assume it is just a bus service and we as helicopter operators give them that confidence that you can have a helicopter shuttle any time of day - "we'll even make it cheaper for you at night" !! Sadly, when we had this thread a couple of years ago we said that there is going to be an inevitable accident doing this, and then sure enough, within 15 months there was. But still very few questions were asked, no questioning why a good, well trained crew could find an approach so difficult that 9 people lost there lives, or asking, if this had been daylight would the accident have happened ?? I'll have to bite my lip slightly as I am aware we still don't have the full report even after 2 years.
It seems to me that as helicopter operators we used to carry out about 3 rotations with everything back in the hangar by 4pm, before we sold these later slots at a knocked down price. I accept that these later flights provide for a more efficient use of aircraft, but at the same time ......
You now have aircraft routinely flying at night from Sept to April
There is less time for engineers to inspect aircraft
There is considerably less availability of aircraft for training
We are bringing passengers back at 21:30 or later which obviously disrupts their onward travel and time off.
There seem to be many downsides, it clearly isn't as safe as we would like our service to be and as far as positives go, there seems to be just one - As someone said above - Money, Money, Money