Treasure Finder
I was one of the Chief Pilots on the Treasure Finder for a number of years. The sophisticated SAR equipment was developed after a fatal accident one night when all 6 crew members were killed when the aircraft was flown into the sea. Bristow and Louis Newmark, with funding from Shell developed a partly auto hover modification for the 212. It was the LN450, which was later fitted to the full auto hover S61s and went on to become the LN400. It was mostly the addition of a Doppler coupled to the flight director and Decca RNAV and enabled the pilot to hover at 40 feet radalt with his feet off the pedals, but controlling cyclic and collective manually, after being given FD directions from a target overhead position (usually derived from getting an overhead from the homer), to descend to 200 feet and run in to wind to the target until a visual was obtained. It required quite a lot of continuation training, which was paid for by Shell. We also got the FLIR fit in addition to the nite sun which we'd had for some years. We had also experimented with some early marks on the ANVIS night vision system, which was n ot particularly successful at the time.
The aircraft were already very nose heavy and C of G problems became worse with the Doppler fit, so Bristow also went ahead and fitted the Kevlar (helium filled) float bottles in the hell hole to help rectify this. For its day, I though the system was very successful and I felt a lot more confident on night SAR call outs in bad weather in the LN450 machines