Justthefact, with all due respect you were a cop not a pilot or aircrew and GASU was not a semi HEMS operation with off site landings. Respect to your experience but it's not that relevant and it's pretty clear things have changed.
A couple of points, sure the Air Corps had a good safety record with helicopters. I think Aerospatiale once calculated they should have lost twenty Alouettes over the period they were in service. But they only ever had eight and only lost a couple.
Impressive? At first sight. Then you consider the reality. They were day VFR only, rarely deployed away from base and never saw any form of combat or even austere deployments. As you also point out the pilots were conservative to the point of frustration to the Gardai
were a royal pain because they were so safety conscious and it impacted on the GASU operation.
Thanks for confirming that rumour.
As ever you fall back on the usual BS accusations when someone points out some faults of the Air Corps:
Quiet aside from all the Agendas going on here....I suspect a number of you guys need heli jobs or have a personal axe to grind with the IAC
Yeah I hate the Air Corps because they didn't pick me
, juvenile crap.
The point is that this kind of HEMS flying is notoriously risky. In the UK and the US it's invariably flown by very experienced ex military pilots with a lot of time flying into risky situations sometime under fire. This is not the current Air Corps level of experience.
The fact is that many people confidently predicted an accident or incident like this and were proved right. It doesn't matter whether or not the the pilots were well trained or not. The simple fact is that they have little or no experience of HEMS work and indeed minimal experience of operations away from Baldonnel or into tight LZs. This operation was set up as a political expedient by politicians, presumably abetted by the Air Corps brass.
None of this can be construed as criticism of the individual aircrew involved in this. Whether they be well trained or poorly trained, inexperienced or experienced. They're soldiers. They obey orders. They don't have a choice.
Quite simply this operation should never have been considered in the first place.
So get off your high horse.