My sincere condolences to the family and friends of the two missing occupants of the missing aircraft.
But some things need to be said about the operations of this accident helicopter that have occurred in the past.
When the helicopter was N registered it had been operating from St.Kitts. The operations were terminated by the OECS aviation authorities when it was shown that the pilot only held a PPL and not a commercial license. As well, some legitimate operators in the region were upset at some of the operations that had occurred in St.Kitts and surrounding islands, some of which were not in compliance with local regulations. Night VFR operations was just one of the examples.
It is sad that continuing these same type of operations in another jurisdiction possibly led to the occurrance of this accident.
How was this allowed to happen? Right now one can only speculate.
As the investigation into this accident was beginning, there was an arrest of a government official in St.Maarten concerning forgery of "Documents and Licenses". Could these two events be connected?
Other questions can be asked. Why was the police helicopter not utilised for this mercy flight? Why was this helicopter allowed to operate with no pop-out floats over water? And we know it was regularly operated over water by the story on the website describing a tour flight which descended to 300 feet over the water. Highly unlikely that a safe auto-rotative landing could be accomplished in the event of an engine failure.
Hopefully there will not be a knee-jerk reaction from the authorities(aviation or others), due to this accident, that affects the operations of future legally compliant helicopter operators in the Netherland Antilles.