SASless:
With the turnover rate in GOM companies in general and PHI in particular....there should not be much "old time thinking" left!
Or do the old farts run off the new kids?
SAS, the turnover issue at PHI was always with the least-senior pilots. PHI always enjoyed a core group of senior pilots (about half) who'd been there forever and weren't going anywhere but in a pine box. There was a big, ever-widening gap in age between this core group and the younger guys who kept rotating in and out.
Also, PHI always put two very senior pilots in their "big ships." Contrast this to Era, where new-hires are generally installed as SIC for a while. This was always a big selling point for PHI
("Two highly-experienced Captains for your passengers!") but did little to hand down the expertise and knowledge from one generation to the next via mentoring. In fact, at PHI that was almost non-existent. (I understand that it has changed since I've been gone.)
In 2001 (the last year for which I had current figures when I left the company), fully *HALF* of PHI's 530 pilots were age 50 or older. Only a handful (and I mean quite literally only five or six) were over 60. And of those, only two were actual line pilots. This told me that as line pilots, we helicopter guys are pretty much done by age 60, regulations or not.
It also did not take a scientist of rocketry to see that by 2010 or so PHI would have just about lost all of their Viet Nam-era vets.
Consider: If a kid was 21 in Vietnam in 1970, say, that would make him 60 today. Of course, the Army kept cranking out helicopter pilots well into the 1970's. But even if a kid was 21 in 1975, that would still make him 55 now. Tick-tock-tick-tock... (And let's not even talk about the older pilots who've transferred over to more stable EMS jobs just to get away from the horrible GOM lifestyle of being away from home for half your life - which PHI, laughably, thinks is such a benefit.)
The experience is being lost. Not to take anything away from the less senior pilots, but having a guy with a mere 5 years or so of GOM experience as PIC of an S-92 and an SIC with even less than that is not ideal. And it's certainly not what PHI has always enjoyed. But it's going to happen.
The sad thing was that PHI didn't seem to care. When I would try to point it out to them...well, they just didn't want to know. It was never a problem in the past, wasn't right then, and would not be a problem in the future.
We'll see.
Q: So who are flying the PHI big ships now?
A: The very few (and rapidly diminishing) "old timers."
I'd be curious to see the pilot roster at other big companies, to find out just exactly how many pilots are still flying at age 60+. (I certainly don't want to be - I've got seven years to go.)