The K14 was an interesting, though short-lived contract. Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij BV, better known as NAM wanted to break the KLM Helicopters monopoly on the Dutch North Sea sector and so put a contract out to tender for a day/night SAR machine, but at a time scale which made it impossible for KLM to certify any of their aircraft and as Bristow, with aid from Shell and new Louis Newmark avionics had pioneered a day/night certified Bell 212 SAR on the Brent offshore operation after a fatal accident on a night SAR in the 1980s, they got the contract. I was pulled out of Redhill FTS and sent up to the Brent for an SAR refresher before being sent to Holland as Bristow was a bit short of LN450 night SAR qualified pilots. In reality, the aircraft was just used for flights from offshore to Den Helder. Because of Dutch regulations we had to spend a 24 hour period ashore once a week. Den Helder was closed on Sundays so we operated into Schiphol and KLM mainline catering supplied us with a superb lunchbox of goodies. We then returned to the K14 and had the traditional Dutch rijstaffel lunch before departing to North Denes and being accommodated in Great Yarmouth at Shell's expense. I seem to remember that it was The Imperial we used as opposed to The Ambassador that Bristow used to put us in. This was also used as crew change day and a hire car would be waiting at North Denes for the pilot going out and he then had his excellent KLM goody box to sustain him for the drive home. The incoming pilot would arrive on Monday and we'd depart back to the K14 to be back there around 1300.
During this time I had one quite exciting flight back to K14 from Den Helder when there was a lot of electrical activity and storms around and the radar kept spiking. I was IMC at night about 30 miles out from Den Helder and suddenly the HF antenna appeared to have a small ball of St Elmos fire on the end, there was a loud crack and we had a total electrical failure. It later transpired that almost every circuit breaker had blown, so we had no emergency lighting, radios or electrical instruments. Using a torch to illuminate everything it was a careful 180 turn to head back towards Den Helder, stop watch running and a careful descent to 1,000 feet in the hopes of getting VMC. In those days Den Helder used to close at night and after our departure the airfield had shut down. Luckily, as the airport manager was getting into his car to drive home, he heard the unmistakable sound of a Bell 212 flying towards him from the sea and had the presence of mind to go back and turn on all the airfield lighting which I saw with great relief from about 2 miles out. The KLM staff got us a hire car and we went off to the sport Hotel in Callantsoog where I met up with a former FTS student, Jim Trott. At that time Bristow had been unable to offer all its sponsored ab-initio cadets employment and had come to an agreement to loan some of them out to KLM.
It was obvious the aircraft was going to take some time to fix, so I flew back to UK the next day.
Once the Bristow 6 months was up, the Schreiner subsidiary, Airspeed took over the contract based out of Texel using a Dauphin C2 (with no SAR capability) effectively ending the monopoly KLM had in the Dutch offshore sector.