Final HOMP report

[JimL]

For those of you who have an interest in Operational Monitoring, the final HOMP report on follow-up activities has now been issued.

This issue reports on the extension of the Helicopter Operations Monitoring Programme (HOMP), originally trialled on the Bristow Helicopters Ltd Super Puma fleet, to a second operator (CHC Scotia Helicopters Ltd - Super Puma) and a second helicopter type (Bristow Helicopters Ltd - S76). The safety benefits of HOMP were successfully transferred in both cases despite significant differences between the operators and between the helicopter types.

Paper can be found here:

http://www.caa.co.uk/publications/publicationdetails.asp?id=1425

These systems have been 'Recommended' in the latest proposal for amendment of ICAO Annex 6 Part III - along with EGPWS (TAWS) and ACAS.

[JimL]

I thought this criticism of HOMP ought to feature in its correct place; quite frankly, I would be suprised if MM had read any of these reports.

From Moochie Moo:-

JimL, I read your other post regarding the HOMP report with interest and wanted to express my views:

HOMP is the latest version of the North Sea's 'Emperor's New Clothes'.

If you think an algorithm based on Cooper-Harper ratings can assess workload without the qualitative input of a calibrated human, it goes to show how little is understood about what is being done here. Give industry a fraction of what is being spent on this white elephant in the form of additional training hours and efforts training-the-trainer, and I assure you the rate of incidents will reduce.

This is another example of what the UK 'committee syndrome' spawns, regurgitating the same issues year after year achieving very little in real-world operational safety matters and when money is spent, it is misdirected.

Rig design for helicopter operations is not rocket science, and neither is landing a helicopter on a rig. Developing HOMP for turbulence assessment is nothing more than idle intellectual musings.

If HOMP has been recommended for inclusion in ICAO Annex 6 Part III (tell me it ain't so!), my bet is was done so by someone who knows little of operating outside of the North Sea. To put this forward for inclusion in an international document is waaaay too premature.

It isn't progress JimL, it's misidentification of the real issues. This whole subject is also a case-in-point of why the Americans have a helicopter manufacturing industry and the British don't.

Disregard the last sentence. I had the urge to finish on an inflammatory note.

[212man]

I particularly like the instances of descending to 145 ft at night on an ARA and shuttling with bank angles in excess of 60 degrees. They must be the sorts of areas of training that MM was referring to!

[RMAN]

Assuming that Moochie Moo is an American contributor his negativity towards HOMP is, perhaps, not surprising. In the UK and also other parts of Europe, the fixed wing version of HOMP has been delivering real safety benefits in the real world for 40+ years while the US has been dragging its heels. However the benefits have been recognised by ICAO and it becomes a standard practice (i.e. mandatory) for a/c above 27T from Jan 2005.

HOMP simply applies the same process to helicopters and if MM took the trouble to read the reports he would see the significant benefits that were immediately obvious in the trials. Suffice it to say that all North Sea operators (UK and Norway) have either implemented or are implementing HOMP completely voluntarily.

Finally, the turbulence algorithms are only an add-on to HOMP, not the raison d'etre for HOMP as implied by MM. In any case, if turbulence is not a real issue then somebody needs to tell all the North Sea pilots - turbulence was ranked by them as being the most significant safety hazard in a well supported (74% response rate) questionnaire-based survey. CAA paper 97009 refers, but that's probably another report that MM hasn't read.