We seem to be going round a circular argument. If the highly paid pilot was as reliable as he professes then all would be well but as the stats reveal - they are not!
Helicopter manufacturers are not required to test the in-flight detachment of doors/hatches/access panels/or windows. These could be equally tragic events and in some types you feel that it occurs often enough to be a certification issue. By the same token a system that has a fail-safe design can avoid such testing. I am assuming that the 139 certification team took that view.
I am a simple soul. Designed to save my hide and never having malfunctioned is the argument for flying with floats armed versus a tragic history of even the best pilots being caught out by a sequence of events that led to an otherwise survivable contact with the water.
We as an industry have an extraordinary resistance to the embracing of SOPs and much more than our FW colleagues appear to feel we have the right to chose when and what we do by way of procedures. Above all I see a regular resistance to the use of formal checklists that have been 'de-rigour' in the FW world for decades. Be it upon your own head. Read the accident reports on a regular basis and you will see what poor cockpit procedures, poor CRM and poor MCC brings - death and misery, that's what.
For the 'I know better' brigade remember those famous words - "You don't know what you don't know". I have no more confidence in 'sales-blurb' than the next guy but the stats speak for themselves.
G.
