It's a crazy situation regarding night flying out here in Nigeria. We're only allowed to fly at night on life saving flights or to practise for them. There are very few actual life saving flights and all we do is practise every 90 days (at locations where there is a night standby). This means that most people are hopelessly out of practise and many pilots have extremely limited night experience anyway unless they happen to have come here from the North Sea. We too have very varied machines in which to carry it out, from Bell 412s with a fairly rudimentary autopilot, very old S76s with no autopilot and new S76s with a good 4 axis autopilot. The worst thing about the S76 is that it is a cr*p helicopter for night flying with a high nose attitude (especially when it is light with just 2 pilots in it for training) and is very difficult to see out of in any rain. For those reasons I think it's about time the operators out here only allowed night emergency flights to be carried out fully coupled. The average pilot on my operation carries out a maximum of 12 night landings a year and gets maybe 6 hours of night flying.
What's even worse is that we have nothing like the Jigsaw you refer to on the North Sea. From Eket it's not so bad because there are a lot of boats around to pick us up if we ditch, but the guys in places like Port Harcourt and Warri who may have long transits over very dangerous territory with large numbers of armed terrorists and no chance of being picked up until daylight even if they survive a powered forced landing at night. There are probably not more than 4 helicopter winches in the entire country and to my knowledge there is no night winch training, mostly because the helicopters have no equipment to enable them to carry out night winching safely. I worry each and every single time I have to fly at night, but if I refuse I'd certainly be fired by a company whose managers have no interest in the safety of their crews, only making the money they're paid for putting our lives in harm's way
