and is not for someone who doesn't really know his personal limits
Hmm. If I may roll in my twopence-worth?
I'm rather uncomfortable at all this talk of "knowing one's limits". We are all trained to be capable of flying to the legal limits - be they VFR or IFR and though there are cases where one might decline to operate in conditions above these "knowing one's limits" is seldom the deciding factor. Yet here we are talking about this as though it were the main criterion as opposed to what the regs let us do - and here I think is where many in our business come unstuck - by disregarding the regs and saying (to themselves, I hope), "Well, the fog isn't that deep, we'll pop out into good victor mike in a hundred feet, I can hack that" or similar. NO! If you are on a VFR departure (as, for instance, a night confined area must be) you CANNOT do it in IMC, regardless of whether you think you can hack it. I've done it, who hasn't? We all pride ourselves on getting the job done and sometimes this brings the blinkers a bit closer to the head than they should be. Trying to get into a confined site in fog when base, 20 miles away is wide open for instance, or texting while doing it...
I think there's often a huge temptation to fly to "our limits" as we self-interpret them rather than annoy the boss/client and get regarded as the guy who says "No". The alternative - being the guy who says no isn't much fun I grant you, I've been there and lost employment over it, quite unjustly but if there is another guy who will and you won't then who do you suppose gets the work?
I don't know if there is a solution but my experience with charter and corporate was that the educated clients (aviation educated I mean) were fine, but some of the others were a nightmare. If you leave the drunken sods at Cheltenham because they turn up at 1730 and it will be too dark to get them into their garden the boss creates because he gets the irate call from the pax who now won't pay. Ditto if you drop them off at Elstree instead, or take them to base and order a 30 mile taxi. It's a lose/lose situation.
Grow a pair? Come on, we're only human, and when the boss is the richest main in Turkmenistan and he owns the helo you fly and the company that operates it, and you have a mortgage, a wife and kids...what
do you do - in reality, if you want a reference when you leave?
I once flew for a small G reg airline of whose fleet of half a dozen aircraft
not one single one was fit to fly IFR, some with multiple no-go faults. Failing to bust minima earned public scorn from the CP in the crew-room. Yet no one snagged the aircraft and no one cancelled flights over this - we didn't dare. How would we get another job if we did the right thong and got the boot? The CAA weren't the least bit interested either. Go tell them to "grow a pair"!
It isn't anywhere near as clear-cut as we'd like it to be, and, as ever, the rule is
caveat emptor when you take on a job. Good knowledge of the industry can keep you clear of some of the chancers, but not all, it's all a bit of a lottery for the pilots. For the employers? Well, there's plenty of others who'd kill for your job. Ever heard that line before? Kill themselves maybe, some of them. Because the Company doesn't kill anyone...