It is all well and good trying to design a cabin that is perfect for evacuation but it will take time (years) to design and certify such a helicopter. We have to look at the present cabins and improve them as required. This is not a new problem in the 1990s some oil companies wouldn't use the rear centre seat on the 332. The seats then were also more bulky and some had head rests as well.
Today the SP windows have been made bigger and the seats redesigned to be less bulky.
In my opinion more should be done in the way we operate to make sure that there is a standard which if flown correctly won't allow inadvertent ditchings.
I quote below from the ETAP accident report where a fully serviceable helicopter was "landed" on the water. The first quote concerns the initial approach.
At 1831 hrs the helicopter descended to a height of 300 ft, at a range of 7 nm
from the ETAP. As it did so it entered low cloud and the crew lost sight of
the ETAP, so they commenced a climb and at a height of 400 ft they regained
visual contact with the platform. The crew discussed the conditions and agreed
that they had encountered a fog bank. They elected to remain at 400 ft and,
with 5 nm to run to the ETAP, continued the approach visually, monitoring
their range using the weather radar.vironment which allows
This is not the way to approach a rig in those conditions - as a former shuttle pilot our limit for "cruise between rigs" was 500ft amsl. In those conditions I would approach at 500ft - flare height, with the intention of orbiting the rig to asses the way the fog banks were affecting conditions - Fog was a common problem in the ETAP area at certain times of the year. Once you assess that a bank is not going to interfere with your approach you make a slightly steeper descent keeping the green deck lights in view at all time. This was a routine procedure but I was very used to flying at night and on some contracts would do 21 night rig landings - 21 being a BP limit. So in a 2 week period off shore I would do a max of 294 night landings.
Contrast this with the experience level of the crew on the ETAP flight below.
Night Deck Landings Commander 12 last 90days 15 last 365 Days
Co-pilot 9 last 90days 16 last 365 Days
12 night landings in the past 90 days it not very many!
To counter this lack of practice a solid foolproof way of approaching a rig at night has to be constructed. This has been done now and DB has done a lot of work to make the procedure safe and hopefully easy and foolproof to use.
A through review of all approach procedures needs to be done, across all 3 companies, to make sure that the best practice of one company can be used to improve the SOPs of the other. ideally the SOPs for every type of approach will be the same for each company
I won't prejudge the out come of the latest accident but if it was a procedural failure then 2 sophisticated SPs with good autopilots managed to "land" on the water. Procedures and autopilot settings have to be rigorously applied to stop this happening again.
HF