training and currency
Ive not seen any report about the puma incident, so these comments are just in general terms, and not specific to the incident.
I think it's more an issue of lack of regularity and specific training with the night approaches rather than DB's suggestion of totally tearing up the procedures and starting from scratch. I think that for the large part, we have adequate procedures and guidance in place for both ARA's (i know DB was only referring to night VMC landings, but he did bring in the ARA minimums) and visual appraoches. At night time for short shuttle work (less than 10nm sector) we have 500 foot minimum for visual contact flight (300 foot day time), and this combined with a 500 foot minimum for night circling ARAs (300 foot day) seems to me to be fairly strong guidance that at night time be established on final at 500 foot - ie no big heading changes below 500 foot (300 foot day). I realise this is not stated as an absolute rule, but feel the guidance is there for us to ignore at our peril. The exception to this is the night time non-circling ARA, when at minimums we would be at 300 feet, 15 degrees off track, and .75 nm from the rig - a reasonably large visual manouvre in bad weather and at night.
If you speak to the guys who flew the forties shuttle, or the Blackpool guys, in general i think that they are a lot more comfortable with night off-shore flying than the northern north sea pilots. This is purely due to the vast number of night landings these bases involve (when i moved from Aberdeen to train at Blackpool i logged more landings in 3 days than i had in my final 2 months in Aberdeen).
I'm not sure how to address this issue, but would suggest that the focus should be on using the procedures we have in place (with a very few exceptions) and finding some way of improving the training and regularity of crews to fly night approaches.
Andy