Ah I remember something now....the "English" driving need to take back to Blighty at least half of their chop allowance! ::oh:

I can just see a few of the stingy rascals figuring out how to do that on zero kobo per day now! But I bet you there are some who are able to do so somehow!:uhoh:

Reckon they will take it in kind....like bottles of salad sauce or perhaps a few tins of Pilchards or a cabbage or two tucked under their arms?:=

SASless, silent?
 

Gagged... maybe!

I am, as always, open to offers. If you check with Doc Kupa you will discover that I was OIC condom distribution for the BRC in my previous life so that I could waft among the container bar patrons like an angel of mercy dispensing grace. Well, rubber johnnies actually, but it's almost the same thing. Could that be a big marketing point: You pay for the nightfighters but you get the accessories free? The later divorce still comes at full price, though.

You know that the guys who got rich from the gold rushes were the ones selling stuff to the prospectors. That is how Levi Strauss began, selling pantaloons. It might be so that there's more money to be made nowadays in the container bar business than in doing the flying. NEO is sure to have then numbers for this at his fingertips, along with just how much a generator will fetch nowadays on Fernando Po. (I know one won't fit through the door of a Dornier 328 because I measured it.)

You can all cheer up when I tell you that the outfit I work for now pays the Yanks and Canucks exactly the same numbers as the Yurpeens. The only tiny, tiny diffo is that Yanks get USD and the Yurpeens get Euros. What is losing 40% in the deal, anyway? Do they think pilots are stupid or something?

There is no moaning about CLA because there isn't any!

Expenses are paid at the rate of $34 USD per day. Try a day in Switzerland on that kind of money! You can blow all your expenses on one good meal drinking nothing but Apollinaris.

Travel inside Germany (for a work visa, one per tour needed and it is up to you to get it) is reimbursed at the rate of a second-class rail ticket, not the actual costs incurred. (I especially liked that "second-class" bit! It showed me just where I am in the food chain nowadays.)

Training is done in your time off and is not counted as duty time, thus not attracting duty pay.

On the other hand, travel is short. I hop over to Paris and then the onward journey to the desert is less than three hours. At the other end there is no, "What do you have for me?" or "Do you see me?" or even "Dis is ah SERIOSS HOFFENCE!!"

Something else that might cheer you all up, even though, yes, we are all plank drivers, sorry, Aviators, is that my back-to-back (30 years-old, frozen ATPL, just returned from PNG where he worked as a missionary pilot) quit after about a year on line to go fly a Dash 8 in the EU. Two other guys and a woman quit after him to do something similar. This is in the last four weeks, mind you.

The company is going mad trying to keep people, caught, it would seem, in a bind between paying as little as possible and not being able to keep people who have been hired and trained at no little expense. I did drop a hint to management about how long people stuck around that notorious dump, Nigeria when we were paid lots of nice, crisp pound notes but that is such an obvious idea that it went ignored. They will probably raise expenses to $35 per day, see if that does the trick.

Chuks,

You sure you aren't working for Bristow?

Mamaput

I mean the new aero paint scheme with 3 orange stripes, the old aero paint scheme had 2 orange stripes.

I am not on the 225 (maybe later...), for the moment I quite enjoy the shuttle :ok:

Business ??
 

No money in bars, container or otherwise; nobody is allowed out to drink in them anymore. No, the money is in performance related end of contract bonus paying short term jobs or security consulting. That's where you'll find me, one day anyway.

Shut that gate !! Throw that person out !! Stay in the convoy !! Yup, I can do that............. But I can sort you out with a brand new second hand generator too if you need one.

Yes chuks, that was a semi colon up there.:ok:

NEO

What next?
 

Semicolons; ellipsis...

I'm very dissappointed. Next you'll be telling me no Santa Claus?

Cheers
From Las Vegas

Anyone have any idea who the new Bristow MD will be ? Will he be permanent or a stand in until Oni comes back ?

Lobotomy procedures must be taking longer than anticipated....that or the cost of Thorozine has gone the way of petrol prices and they can only afford small doses.:rolleyes:

A little birdy in Richmond told me that CHC may be moving some of their helos out of Port Harcourt by end month. Has something to do with ACN. Anyone have anymore scuttlebutt? Perhaps I should just shoot the little birdy if there's nothing to it.

Have heard similar rumblings of aircraft being taken out of PH by CHC. My own little birdy tells me it has to do with large sums of money not having been paid to CHC by ACN. No firm number mentioned mind you, but I'm lead to believe it could be in the tens of millions of dollars.

My two cents.

A CHC Global manager mentioned to me in the bar (so it must be true!) last week that CHC may pull out of Nigeria altogether and concentrate on other more lucrative areas (such as Brasil.)

I'm sure there are plenty of other operators waiting to step in.............. or are there ?

212man,

I'm sure you will be pleased to learn that Brains is once again CTC Bell !! And so the wheel turns full circle. Can you do me a favour and ask Doc to try sending the message he was going to forward to me again ?

NEO

Caverton Helicopter Incident In Brass.
 

:{It would have been another aviation disaster in Brass yesterday when the Red Dauphin helo 'collected' some high tension cable on take-off en route to Port Harcourt. It was evident that the crew were not aware of the strike despite the vibration encountered en route the near 60Nm trip that-'NIL DEFECTS' was written on the tech log as usual.:ugh: It was the engineer on turn around maintenance that found the almost one meter cable 'glued' to the main rotor blade with some damages to the vertical fenestron. It was a miraclous escape!:D NCAA officials from the accident investigation department were seen around today in NAF Base on investigation. Later the blue A star flew in the Caverton bigwigs to inspect the helo.
Last two weeks too a helicopter belonging to Aero/CHC was also involved in an accident while on training mission in Bonny:uhoh:.Less than a month ago, it will be recalled that an aeroplane en route to Obudu was declared missing to date. One is still wondering what must have caused the incident.

Ruma, that sounds interesting! Was that from, the Agip terminal at Brass? I don't remember any cables on the take off path there. From what you say it's amazing they made it back to NAF. Did they have passengers on board for the flight? Is their other blue Dauphin serviceable?

The CHC helicopter damaged in Bonny is still impounded I'm told. CHC are also sending 2 helicopters to other African countries for contracts there, so quite a reduction in their fleet until the EC225s arrive in May.

So its true. I missed out on a job with you guys out there today because of a hard landing(?) and the machines not coming online as quickly as expected. Apparently no hiring until September but 80 pilots for next year. Back to the bush...

Steve,
Stay close to your phone.
With CHC, a "no hiring until September" can quickly turn into a "Er, can we expect to see you at training next week?" :rolleyes:

......... though of course with 2 Dauphins leaving, one for Algeria and one for Angola very soon, they may not need anyone for a while. There are still rumors of CHC rotary pulling out of Nigeria (difficult on fixed wing side of course as most of that is down to Chief Ibru).

Caverton
 

A bit difficult to miss the 9 inch hole at the top of the tail boom and the large piece of multi-strand cable hanging out of the rotor blade I'd have thought:(. Their Dauphins must normally be incredibly badly balanced if the crew noticed nothing :}

Perhaps Caverton crews are naturally badly balanced. ;)

Is it true the 2 365s are heading for Sudan? Surely thats somewhere that makes PH look safe.

Bristow 412 Shot by Millitants
 

A bristow 412 was shot at Benin river yesterday by millitant on a crew change. The crew manage to land the chopper in Escravos tank farm. Awaiting NCAA for investigation.