Good morning to all Rotorheads,
The Heli training company that I used had a really nice bunch of people, it had some very experienced senior pilots and a handful of very good tutors, but the owners of the company dicatated what happened and what took place, as I progressed from raw pupil to a full PPL(H) I saw things that at the time seemed commonplace within that company, the simplest was the Tec-log with hours that didn't add up, the hour meter not connected, tec-log missing, bolts and nuts lose on engines or even missing altogether, as I gained in experience and knowledge I started to feel that my wellbeing would be served better by me carrying out the most rigourous of pre-flights even to the point of going under the machine to tap random nuts and bolts like my older rels used to do on the railway steamers, this gave me the feeling that I had done as much as I could have done to have a safe flight, however you can never accept that as a full health check on any flying machine, and eventually I did come unstuck by taking a machine up that I had "checked" only to find out that on a previous flight this craft had been the subject of a massive overspeed and the rotor head bearings appeared completely goosed, after the most demanding and shortest flight of my life I managed to get down in one piece, the tech log was strangely missing from when I had looked at it some forty minutes earlier to when I went back to the office, the excuse being that the boss man had taken all logs home to check them out, I never did see that book again until some weeks later I asked to see it so I could enter my flight, comments and signature, however it seems that A N Other had signed on my behalf, and to boot there was no ref to the overspeed that occurred on the ealier flight.
Needless to say I no longer fly with that company, but the sad thing is that when I rang the CAA to ask for advice on what to do about this they simply told me to take it up with the owners of the company! That would be like asking Uncle Saddam to evaluate the meaning of the word TRUTH.
On that fateful flight I was treating a friends son to a birthday flight, that worried and angered me more than the risk against my life. Sadly this company had been involved in a fatal incident earlier in that year and it seems the CAA had picked up nothing!