Got the latest SPO resulting text from the EASA rulemaking board and was surprised. Congratulations to our swiss friends, seems to me the board have fully adopted the very costly swiss helicopter external load and human external load regulations for the whole EASA world.
Now it will become not easy to qualify as pilot for external load operations cause a pilot needs a level qualification, each with much cycles and the instructing personal must be very experienced with up to 500
external load hours under their own belt.
Sure there are some specialised external load operators without problems to fullfill the requirements, but operators with not so much external load orders will get problems to qualify their new pilots for different levels and find instructors.
a few points:
load type 1: short line <20m
load type 2: long line >20m
load type 3: logging
load type 4:construction
300h at least for newbies to start the first external load course on the lowest level 1(500h in mountains)
for construction work <1500kg a pilot needs more than 5000 external load cycles
for the top level construction work >1500kg the pilot will need 2000 flight hours and 10.000 external load cycles.
On all levels different ground and flight instruction, supervision and solo training are required.
40h external load in 24months to be current for external loads
new is also the need for a load data recorder in the helicopter (lifts, weights, torques, power, forces, shocks and electrical activities)
Seems to me in the future fully qualified external load pilots will become very expensive
