Originally Posted by
Satcomm
Birmingham - never say never! Let's just replace 60% of the helicopters in the North Sea. What do you suggest we replace them with? Guess it would be great if we could replace it with something that is guaranteed not to fail. Even with the guarantee, the cost and down time implementation of this would be astronomically. The retraining(hopefully) of everyone from drivers, maintenance, ramp staff to passenger and management would be astonishing. Now minus the guarantee of a perfect aircraft, because that does not exist, I think the safety factor would drastically decrease with drivers that have limited experience of type, engineers that are fixing aircraft they are as familiar with and even ramp staff doing daily operations around aircraft they are not use to. The downtime and limit aircraft support while waiting for aircraft to be manufactured and staff ramped up would have oil companies crippled for passenger movements. The spin off to this would have massive consequences, from cost, fatigue, moral, etc.
A very rare an intelligent comment in this helicopter world .I agree 100%.