AS332L2 Ditching off Shetland: 23rd August 2013

[pilot and apprentice]

Airwave45:

I appreciate that I'm not qualified to sit at the front of the bus, I am capable of reading some stats tho.

Taken from http://www.ogp.org.uk/pubs/434-11.pdf

Between 1998 and 2006 (ok, old data, but still relevant)
North Sea 1.3 million hours flown, 12 accidents, 18 killed. 108k hrs/accident
GoM 3.7 million hours flown, 106 accidents, 53 killed. 35k hrs/accident
Everywhere else 3.1 million hours flown, 69 accidents, 149 killed.

Given that the Noggies are unfairly saddled with Scottish prangs, we'll take them out, giving 650,000 flying hours to work the stats against.

In the Scottish sector, in the above period, you flew 36,111 hours per fatality. 54k hrs/accident
The Americans flew 69,811 hours per fatality 35k hrs/accident . A large amount of which was in single engine single pilot helicopters, which even slf understand is not as good as medium/heavy twins with two pilots up front. and explains lower numbers of fatalities

Rest of the world is 20,805 hours per fatality.

Reasurances that you'll investigate specific incidents mean nothing, you already do that and it doesn't actually make any difference.
(in the overall picture)
Too many and too often is the problem.

And now that we are irked enough to actually look at the stats in detail, it's looking an awful lot like there is a Scottish specific, long term, failing.
Why, with better equipment, are you killing people twice as often as the Americans?

ok, the above is a tad emotive.
But it's meant to be.
If you are leading the world at what you do, great, patronise away.
You are not leading the world at anything bar dropping helicopters in the oggin.
And you are in them whilst they are dropping in.

What can be meaningfully done to improve things?
Why are the Noggies so much better than the Scottish operators?

OK. Nothing about the above relates to the 332, but ok.

I have looked at YOUR stats and found new numbers. Others have added their own observational bias.

HC:

Airwave - lies, damned lies and statistics! Firstly if you look at the accident rate, as opposed to the fatal accident rate, the GoM is far worse. Because they fly small helis, each accident only risks the lives of a handful, so they can have far more fatal accidents than we can. At least a good chunk of the N Sea fatals in that period must have come from the Bristow 76 that disintegrated off Norwich. Really, its hard to see how the operator could have avoided that accident - it was down to an undetectable maintenance error on a rotor blade at Sikorsky. So that one accident really skews the stats. Plus, lots of people can fall into the sea in GoM and in general, because its a more benign environment, they get away without dying. Comparing stats from different types of operations can be misleading.

Again, we aren't saying there is no issue. We are saying that an emotional attack on a type, location, operator, or trade does noone any good.