So do you think the OGP fatality rate will increase or decrease in future years as a result of an increasing number of voluntary ditchings following this accident?
Imagine all the helicopters that were flown by pilots with the same mindset as your senior GOM buddy, which I think is just about all of us - crawl it for the beach. And take all those instances where the lawyer-guided RFM said "land or ditch immediately", like gauge indications, fire warnings that wouldn't go out after firing two bottles into them, chip indications, etc.
If in every one of those cases the pilots had ditched, with the probable 20% loss of life, how many hundreds of pilots and passengers would have perished as a result? As an industry we've left a lot of judgment and final decision making up to the captains in these circumstances. Do we take that away?
Those four bars feeling a little heavy on your shoulders?
Last edited by malabo; 25th Mar 2009 at 20:20.