Sav,
It's nice to see the photo of G-NUTZ. I last flew that in 1990 when I was with McAlpine Helicopters. I'll have a look when I'm next home and see if I have any photos of it.
The 206 with the Ferranti SAS was lovely, like flying a normal 206 through a bowl of cream, it was so smooth!
The pilot transfer work was interesting, but very unprofitable and ultimately a failure. Usually we were only called out when the weather was too bad for the pilots to be transferred by boat. We had one instance where the tanker was pitching and rolling so much the Mast Moment Indicator came on and stayed on and the aircraft had to be flown back to Falmouth like that for a check. I remember driving with Charles Pemberton from Sussex down to Falmouth, where the company rented a small flat above a shop for the crews to stay. We waited for information from the pilot service that the tanker would be in the rendezvous zone (with no radar we relied on the tanker being in a small circular zone, where we would contact it on marine FM, get its latest position and update that on the Decca). We finally got confirmation of an ETA at the RV point and left the docks in very strong winds and low cloud at about 0500 and made our way to the RV circle but could not establish RT contact with the tanker. Falmouth coastguard eventually told us that they had contact with the vessel and that it was hove to in heavy seas with waves breaking over the deck some 60 nm from where we were. Fuel would have been very marginal and we were not willing to risk landing on the deck with waves breaking over it so we returned to Falmouth. The pilot service decided to try and send the pilot by boat and refused to pay for the flight time already incurred. Soon after that the service was terminated.
We had options on 2 BV234 with which we were bidding on BP's Magnus contract (we were unsuccessful). When representatives from BV visited, Speechless and I would be left behind at Shoreham airport while John Hedges and Tony Pannell went out for lunch with them at The Sussex Pad
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One of the spin-offs of that was that we set up a joint venture with Kawasaki in Japan and put in a bid for an SAR contract with KV107s for the government of Bahrain.