SASless wrote:
...Are we seeing a new crisis developing in the helicopter industry? For all of these years, the helicopter operators have been cutting one another's rates in order to take business from the competitor.None had the will to raise rates significantly until PHI did so in the Gulf of Mexico in response to the arrival of the pilot's union and the major pay raise that brought about.
Just to be fair, at PHI the union and the big rate increase were separate issues.
On that side of the pond, Era lead the way, instituting an across-the-board 30% rate increase. PHI and Air Log soon followed in timing which might look to the uninformed eye as bloody collusion. PHI's rate increase was in effect
before the union contract was fully negotiated. I heard that pay and benefits were among the very last bits to be finalized.
Lu makes some interesting suggestions, starting with his letter-writing campaign. But you can send all the letters you want, and it's very likely that they'll simply be ignored. Oh, and you can tell somebody "if an aircraft crashes, the responsibility will be yours!" all you want, but that does not make it so. It is very hard to pin the blame for anything on any one specific person nowadays. And individuals really don't care if their agency takes the heat.
Operators will say, "Our aircraft are safe! They are overhauled and maintained to the current government standards. All of our life-limited parts are within their life limitations." Can even an insurance company argue with that?
Corrosion is something else. Aircraft cannot be kept flying forever, although there are 206's around with over 20,000 hours...on the data plate.
There will be more and more aircraft that are simply not economical to repair, and the hulls will be "scrapped." While that may mean something in the airplane world, it doesn't mean quite the same thing to us. The romantic notion of flying a helicopter to the boneyard to be scrapped is simply erroneous. In the hangar after its last flight, before the airframe is hauled off on a flatbed lorry, all useable bits will certainly be removed from the airframe. Ever seen a helicopter with all the components removed? Not much to it.
But when do you retire the old girl? When the trans finally pulls free of the deck fittings and the aircraft self-scraps? Economics will eventually dictate it. As new problems crop up, new inspection methods will be devised to accommodate them (witness the draconian Bell 47 blade grip inspections). That is how it's always been. But overall, manpower is cheap. ...Cheaper than new airframes, evidently.