Just going through some of the statements:
Colin Milne: Could I perhaps expand on that point a little from a pilot’s point of view? In terms of spare capacity, it is very important to have a diversified fleet as well as redundancy within each individual fleet. For example, nearly two years ago we had the grounding of the Eurocopter EC225 fleet, which was becoming very much the predominant aircraft on the UK North Sea. The grounding of that aircraft caused an immense problem in terms of availability of aircraft. By contrast, in the Norwegian sector where, although the 225 perhaps was not predominant, there was plenty of spare capacity. My understanding is that not a single flight was lost by the Norwegian clients because they had invested in sufficient spare capacity to cope, not only with weather delays—because clearly in the North Sea there are quite often severe weather and fog delays and you have to have catch-up capacity—but they also had the ability to cope with grounding of half of the fleet.
Is this true?
I had the impression that the norwegian fleet is almost S92 and they would in the same situation if this type would be grounded.....