1985 and I found myself re-employed as junior co-pilot on the S61N after 2 redundancies in 3 years on the North Sea, following 10 years as a military heli pilot. New employer sent me to the Shetland Islands to fly from their Sumburgh base to Shell installations in the East Shetland Basin.
One starry and completely windless night I found myself paired with their worst pilot. He would shout "Shut the f**k up!" to any co-p who tried to read from the checklist and he swatted my hand out of the way when I tried to turn the radar to standby after landing on a helideck. He was a bullying swine and an ignoramus of such matters as performance.
The met info showed nil wind anywhere within 200 miles of the ESB, which was confirmed by the vertical platform flares and limp windsocks. As luck would have it, the last stop of our offshore shuttle was a semi-sub with low helideck and the client wanted a full 19 taken back to the beach.
You can imagine the abuse I got when I dared to suggest shuttling the pax in 2 loads to a nearby platform with a much higher helideck. Now you just have to believe me. We lifted into a low hover with not much more than the prescribed fuel minima to return to Sumburgh. Matched torque was wavering around the max 103% as he tried to gain a couple of feet.
We continued hovering like this for 16 minutes while he muttered rubbish like "waiting for a wind gust". Then an engine fire light glimmered for obvious reasons. To my brief relief he landed and the fire light disappeared quickly. I was starting to undo my harness with a view to getting the pax off for dividing into groups, when the collective shot up.
We leapt (slowly) into the air as the torque went above 110%. On forward rotation, we sank close past the helideck edge and I saw out of the corner of my eye our rotor wash ruffling the mirror-flat sea. The anguished gearbox transmitted the remaining horsepower from screaming engines to struggling blades, while the airspeed increased at snail's pace.
After descending to 10' on radalt we returned to Sumburgh in silence, apart from him telling me about take-off techniques like "bouncing off the cushion". We landed with less than 150 lbs fuel per engine, perhaps 5 minutes before a flame-out.
Next morning I told everything to the spineless chief pilot who told me not to worry myself too much about their very senior captain, who really wasn't nearly as bad as people made out. Why didn't I report it to the CAA? Well, it was one man's word against another and in those days we didn't have IHUMS data recorders. But I moved swiftly to another employer as soon as they accepted my application.
The bullying swine has long since retired and you can imagine what kind of retirement I wish him. I believe it's not for nothing that his colleagues experienced gearbox problems resulting in ditchings.