Originally Posted by
DOUBLE BOGEY
CRAB, this is not a court room. Its a discussion forum. From the information available, what I have posted is my personal opinion of how a perfectly serviceable all weather helicopter flying, what should be, a simple task of letting down over the ocean, flew straight into a obstacle 10 x the dimensions (not height) of the average O&G installation.
Not my place to criticise the crew but I believe we should not be afraid to sense the obvious here.
Take away the FLIR, the Rear Crew, the assumed additional expertise of the SAR crew and you have a Offshore ARA in its basic form.
A waypoint, a Radar Target (or several) and a vertical profile (CDFA). Backed up with a sensible Altitude/RADALT Bug response philosophy. Nothing else really needed and this is done every day by the O&G pilots.
I strongly re-emphasise that the merits of the CDFA (not utilised in this approach) would have saved them. However, I keep forgetting, this is Rotorheads and we don't really like silly, new rules that take away are ability to do exactly what we want when we want to do it.
I started on this thread pushing back against Helicomparitor. Now I am beginning to think, having read and seen all the data, his original point may indeed by valid.
DB
It's interesting how pilots from different working environments can see this stuff.
From my own point of view as an onshore corporate person, descending to 200ft 10 miles short of the destination is a suckers move.
DB as a O&G man, you are presumably used to flying on well established routes to known obstacles over water often in ****ty weather.
For SAR people descending to 200ft over water in the middle of nowhere and creeping in marginal weather is their raison d'etre.
You can see how armed with what looks like a planned approach chart the SAR culture and SOPs could collide with what appears like commonsense to other groups. Nevertheless I do detect a certain discomfort from the SAR community on this thread about the overall plan for this approach.