OK, I've been lurking on this thread since it started, and I want to pose some possibly controversial thoughts and questions that may or may not take it back to the "shields down" stage that was mentioned a long number of posts ago.
I need to be up front here and say before I start that I have zero experience at the sharp end of rotary wing, and not much rotary SLF either, but I do have relevant FW professional level licensing, and spent a lot of time working very closely with simulator work, and related areas, including development work with FW MCC when it came into increased focus after Kegworth, as well as some very academic level research work with a major FW manufacturer, which was an eye opener at times, the protectionism even between partners in projects was at times verging on paranoid, but there were probably good reasons for it, given some of the things that have come out of the woodwork since that time.
So, here we go, and I don't have an agenda here against the people at the sharp end, but I do have some issues with the mentality and validity that is behind some of the decision making that's gone on at higher levels.
First, some possibly loaded questions, and the reason will I hope become apparent further down.
If a pilot expresses an interest in learning more about the extremes of the envelope for the type that he (she also assumed for political correctness, ) is flying, and wants to do some extra sim time, is that encouraged or frowned on by the fleet captains, instructors, etc, or facilitated as being "a good idea", or is that pilot black marked for possibly having a handling problem that they don't want to admit to?
Are the simulator instructors people with long experience on the type, or people with a type rating who have been rostered in to sim work for a while?
Is there any "spare" time in the mandatory simulator sessions to allow for "envelope exploring", where a specific scenario can be explored, or analysed, or is sim time so specific that there is only time for the "mandatory" stuff that is deemed essential to pass the check ride and maintain legal currency?
Is maintenance in house, or contracted out to external providers? regardless of where the service is provided, does that service have any "spare capacity" that allows them to cover in a timely manner squawks that are reported but not critical to continued operations?
Is there any slack in airframe usage scheduling to allow for unplanned maintenance, or do non critical squawks get deferred to the next scheduled check date/time?
Does the company have any formal procedure for raising issues with SOP's that don't produce the required result, or for reviewing SOP's that produced an ambiguous result in certain circumstances?
Are there any "local exceptions" to SOP's that everyone knows about, and uses, but are not part of the documented operation?
I am going to digress a little here, and this is unfortunately fixed wing rather than rotary, but it was specific, and may explain where some of my thoughts are coming from.
A long time ago, at a flight simulation conference on the other side of the pond, visits to local sim providers were part of the agenda. One of those visits was to a small GA jet aircraft simulator, and the 2 of us that were in that session (licensed pilots, but not type rated, and with varying experience) were introduced to an exercise that was not "standard training", but was used for fun but with a few fringe benefits. The exercise was to start from "a sea level runway threshold", in CAVOK conditions, ready to roll. As brakes were released, start the stop watch. Take off, climb to 10,000 Ft, then land back, any runway, and stop, at brakes on, the stop watch stops, shortest time wins, only rule is don't break the airframe.
It was an interesting session, and went on over time to become an interesting challenge when taken back to various places with other simulators. In theory a bit of fun, but what it highlighted very positively was the need to have raw data handling and flying skills, and to be able to fly to the extremes of the envelope in order to get the best time, with looking out of the window to assess the progress an essential part of the exercise.
Where it became thought provoking was when the same scenario was moved the other end of the spectrum, a 747-400 simulator, and tried in some spare time on type rated first officers. The same 2 non type rated people that had first been introduced to this exercise had successfully both set a time of about 6 minutes 30 seconds. When 3 different type rated crew members tried the same scenario, 2 of the 3 broke the airframe in the air, and it was clear that the reason was unfortunately that they were so used to flying the magenta line, and staying within the 10% of the envelope either side of straight and level, when it came to doing things at the edge of the envelope, they had never been anywhere even close to it. and to make it worse, did not have the underlying raw data and "look out of the window" flying skills to allow them to do something very different from flying it with everything on and working correctly
As part of a multi disciplinary EU wide research project with one of the major aircraft manufacturers human factors section, we did some serious work with a "generic" airbus, and as part of the research, we had to do a number of exercises in a level D simulator, to validate what "our" simulator was going to do. We "discovered" that one major european airline had not required their simulator provider to handle some of the more extreme ends of the envelope in respect to manual reversion, as "the analysts" (for analysts read beancounters) had decided that the statistical chance of this event happening on an airframe was/is so low, the costs of implementing that level of reality in the simulator, and training how to manage it "are not justified". We ended up having to go across to the West Coast of the USA to a different manufacturer's simulator, in a different carrier, in order to get the results we needed, as they had implemented the needed code to provide training, and were doing so. These 2 examples were not with Low cost carriers, and they happened 10 years ago before the recent recession and increased pressures on margins.
For me, the holes in the swiss cheese are several.
The reduction in the numbers of ex military pilots coming into civilian aviation, (FW and rotary) they have had to be replaced somehow, and there is unfortunately no short cut to experience.
The reluctance of bean counters to respect and retain the high hours experienced pilots, because they are worth paying a premium for.
The downgrading of the skill levels of the instructors in simulators, they now "tick boxes" to show that the exercise has been done, rather than ensure that the subtle "gotchas" have been discovered and learnt, and in some cases, they never learnt the gotchas themselves, because "The system" no longer allows for flexibility in the sim, it only covers the basics, and recurrency.
The reduction in the number and skill levels of maintenance, partly through bean counter pressure, and partly through regulatory "allowance" mean that there is not the "slack" in the system to allow for non scheduled events in the way there used to be, and the reduced numbers of licensed and type rated engineers spend a higher proportion of their time signing and rubber stamping the paperwork to protect the posteriors of the higher echelons of management in the event of a failure, mistake or problem..
The increase in pressure to use automation on all occasions ("To reduce costs") has diluted the skill base in subtle and insidious ways, resulting in an increase in airframe operators rather than drivers, the difference being that drivers are ahead of the automation, operators are with or behind the automation
The increase in allowed duty time, and related issues around things like travel, means that there are subtle increases in fatigue levels, so reacting and responding in a timely manner to insidious events before they become incidents or accidents is potentially more problematic
A close friend of mine was much involved with the design and implementation of the first FW CAT 3 autoland on Trident, and he shares some of the concerns that I've outlined above, and has (with me) only contempt for the scenario where an underskilled crew stayed stalled all the way down to a fatal accident because they lacked the raw data flying skills to recognise and adequately deal with an unreliable airspeed. Some of the other recent FW incidents are equally reprehensible, to the extent that San Francisco has, as a result of the Asiana accident, "banned hand flown approaches" to the 2 runways that approach over water for foreign aircrews. What an indictment of standards!
In the recent and under discussion incident that is the subject of this thread, it is reasonably clear from the comments and suggestions that the airframe has now been deemed to be failure free, but can we really call the now impied and underlying cause "pilot error", or should be more realistically be calling this, and many other incidents and accidents in both FW and rotary flying "system errors", in that while the pilots may well have been the first to arrive at the scene of the accident, it may not have been a failing on their part alone that contributed or caused that arrival to happen in the first place. That for me is what is screaming out loud in this very thought provoking thread, and what needs to be addressed by the oil companies, the operators, the airframe manufacturers, the regulators and the passengers, as it is only when all of these groups are working together that some of these issues will be adequately and effectively addressed.
The last comment, which may or may not be relevant, in among all the statistics about flying hours, and types and accident ratios, has anyone factored in the passenger kilometers, from what I have seen of it, the number of passenger kilometers flown is significantly higher in the NS than in other areas, so the number of fatalities per passenger kilometer will probably end up being lower than places like the GOM.
I'm not saying that the NS operators can be complacent as a result of that, far from it, the stakes are so much higher with larger airframes.
If I've ruffled feathers, I hope I've done in in a constructive way, based on observations and feedback from what I regard as reliable sources, and an unemotional overview of a very long thread.
I have no malice or hidden agenda towards the people that are at the sharp end, far from it, if I have a target, it would be the faceless bean counters at all levels of the oil companies, operators and regulators that make decisions that are unrelated to the wider picture that is the reality of day to day operations in what I recognise is sometimes a very hostile environment.
The people at the sharp end do what they do, in the way that they do it, because "the system" says that is the way they should work, and rarely do they deviate from those ways. I hope that my comments here cause people to stop and think about "the system" in a wider and unemotional way, and if "the system" seems to be faulty, for whatever reason, it is time to find a way to speak out and say so, rather than hoping that someone else will speak out .