I don't think anyone will try to shout you down Mr Cows. I don't think anyone disagrees with the fact that the pilot made some poor decisions. All we are saying is that things are not Black and White here. This man was not a risk taker, if he was airborne at night with empty supply tanks and two red lights on, he would not have gone off to complete that last ROUTINE task. There was no pressure on him.
SOMETHING must have confused him into believing that all was well in the fuel world. Note my wording, confused him. Even with warning lights and captions, he didn't spot his predicament. No evidence in the memory of a FUEL amber CAD caution is the one that keeps raising my alarm bells. That is triggered by the supply tank indications reaching a certain level on the gauges, NOT by a sensor. If the gauges showed permanent full like G-NWEM, that caption would not have illuminated. And it seems that it didn't.
Whilst that is no excuse for not looking at the clock, no excuse for incorrect drills, no excuse for a poor autorotation, it IS a contributing factor (if it happened of course).
However, what is done is done, we can't take it all back. What we CAN do, is make sure this never happens again. This is a problem, because changing components and procedures is seen as indirectly admitting responsibility. That would be financially catastrophic, so don't flame people for talking about money here, it is actually very relevant to the investigation. Everyone is talking about cockpit voice recorders. Great!! That allows us to see why it happened, but it STILL WOULD HAVE HAPPENED. That leaves education, every new EC135 pilot gets better teaching right now, but in 5 years time, this will be a distant memory. The fact that nothing in the aircraft has changed means that all the holes could line up again.....................