For What It's Worth
I have been flying corporate VIP helicopter ops for well over 10 years now and find my self soul searching every time there is another fatal accident, just like many of you who are keeping this thread going for so long.
I would like to try and summarise some of the excellent points made and throw in a couple of my own.
So lets start with the clients. It is certainly true in my experience that helicopters are very likely to be favoured by self made businessmen. The ones I have flown may not always have started 'poor' but they have all taken or created a small business and turned it into a hugely more valuable one. To do that takes a huge amount of resilience and single minded drive. They are specialists in making people do things that they either don't want to, or maybe even don't believe are possible. The trouble is that they often can't switch off those personality traits and yes, many of them are also risk takers. They do indeed often view regulations and advice they don't like as something to work around because that has got them to where they are today. They are also very prone to making up their own mind about the merits of an argument even if they don't have the required knowledge. They are often not very interested in being educated about aviation because a) its time consuming to do it properly, and b) in their minds they already know the answer because they have worked it out!
So what about the pilots. Well despite our own individual quirks I believe that most corporate helicopter pilots have a number similar traits. We tend to also be high achievers in our chosen field. We tend to confident about our abilities and most of the ones I have met are very keen to 'get the job done'. Not at any cost but one of the critical skills is to give the rich and powerful passenger options. Plenty of warning of problems and varying the exact departure and arrival point are tools that we all use regularly to make keep our passengers happy.
The interesting thing is the environment that these two groups find themselves in.
There has been a lot of discussion about the need to have perhaps more regulation or enforcement or even backbone. But the trouble is this. Lets suppose that in your machine you have decided that the minimum cloud base for a visual takeoff into IMC is 200' and 800M. Thats fine when you are at an airfield with reported met. I challenge anyone to stand in a field in the dark and tell me what the cloud base is with any real level of accuracy. Visibility isn't much easier. Yes there might be some lights to give you an idea, but there might not be. Yet we all use the best judgement we can to decide whether it is safe to go, or not, and we are mostly correct. Sometimes we are wrong and end up with a 'I wish I hadn't done that' thinks bubble. But we live to fight another day. To be honest I am not worried about anybody trying to prosecute me in those circumstances because there is no evidence!
So we end up with this rather dubious mix of money men who want to get the job done, and pilots who want to get the job done operating in an environment of limited or none existent data. So the weather is not what you were expecting. You gaze into the mirk and think I'm not happy with this, and say so, but then lead pax starts to use their persuasive powers. "Are you sure because its really going to cause a problem if I can't go tonight?". Now, if you are sure it's easy, you say so, even if lead pax does get stroppy. But, you are often not in a position to be sure. It's a judgement call and you, 'want to get the job done' as well.
As we are, (mostly), humans we are subject to our ability to rationalise things and then all the things that we have heard about, confirmation bias, risky shift etc all start to make their mark.
If you take the 109 crash en route to Battersea, Pete had already had a look at Elstree and decided to go back to Redhill. But then he got the text "Battersea is open" ( from a client who claims to have been relaxed about not going). Now you get a last minute re route in really nasty conditions. I doubt that Pete was bullied into that decision, my guess is that he felt it was within his abilities.
Next lets have think about Steve Holditch. As I recall he had made an approach to land in very similar conditions to the LBAL accident and ended up in the hover in a field. Had he stopped there we would not have heard about it. But instead he elected to effectively hover taxy the last bit, lost orientation and the rest is history. Again, was he bullied? As a 20 years experience chief pilot, I doubt it. I think it is far more likely that he thought he could finish the flight off safely.
So, are pilots bullied? Of course, I know I have been, and when I felt it was my livelihood at stake it did make me more compliant. This was at an AOC holding operator by the way and eventually I threw the towel in and went elsewhere. It is my honest opinion that, despite this, pilot over confidence is also a major factor. This can be reinforced in the strangest of places. For instance, on my CAA CPL check ride my examiner got me to fly my R22 into real IMC to check my instrument flying!!! Another of my peers was directed to fly at about 800' over suburbia in rubbish weather on his test, and no, he would not have been able to land clear if the lycoming coughed and we both passed.
There are no easy solutions. I recently saw a rather interesting quote that neatly summarises how I try to square the circle. It went something like " A superior pilot is one that doesn't put himself in the position of having to use his superior flying skills". In recent years I have tried to remember that when making a go/no go decision.