IS I think the current situation arises due to various factors. Firstly, fancy GPS approaches are only possible with SBAS and of course its only a couple of years since EGNOS went live n Europe.
Secondly, I think we all felt that the offshore ARA was the risky bit. Onshore non-precision approaches are pretty easy by comparison, and so what could possibly go wrong?
Finally I do think EC made a mistake by not having vertical guidance built in to the FMS / Autopilot in the same way as the 92 does (even though no-one seems to use it!). Also as far as I am aware, the GPS installation is not currently certified to use SBAS (I may be out of date there, but our's certainly aren't), and I believe the standard oil and gas GPS installation is still TSO 129 and not TSO 145. Hopefully EC are progressing this now, and after this accident there will hopefully be more pressure to move to vertical guidance on an NPA.
The 225 does have fantastically precise auto hover, based on Inertial /GPS hybrid (with the emphasis on inertial) but the operational use of that has to be such that a public transport heli doesn't enter a flight regime from which recovery would be difficult in the event of a malfunction.
Edited to add the the emphasis should be on adding to safety margins, not on letting the heli "get in" on a day when it otherwise might not. We only fly to CAT 1 ILS minima, in part because if you look at how often we don't get in to Aberdeen, it is a very rare event. To go to CAT 2 requires a significant amount of additional training for a 50' reduction in DA and its just not worth it. That is presuming the destination and alternate airports even have CAT 2.
Our flight programmes are disrupted due to being unable to get in offshore, or there being no suitable alternates, or due to weather such as lightning. They are very rarely disruptions due to being unable to get in to Aberdeen because of poor vis/low cloud.
Last edited by HeliComparator; 19th Sep 2013 at 14:01.