Blacksod is not an oil rig or platform.

It it an on shore landing site that is used frequently as a fueling point by CHC Irish Coast Guard Crews.....often while SAR Operations are on-going.

The Operator knows landings there will be necessary during adverse weather and at night or both.

Commonsense alone....tells us there should be Weather Minima set forth for flight operations even for SAR Operations and a formal Approach Procedure should be documented for use by CHC crews that adheres to the policies and procedures set forth in SOP's and the AOC.

Even SAR Ops have real weather limits as at some point the aircraft has to be able to carry out the Task and safely return.

Ponto - Crab

Crab asked the question and Ponto tried to answer but the point I was making was that an O & G crew would NOT be able to descent below a 300 feet base because the normal night minima would be something greater than 300 feet. Typically 350+ feet.

G

Hence my point about ARA procedures not being flexible enough for SAR Ops - under those conditions they wouldn't have been able to make an approach at all.

Yes, it is a refuelling base but they were still on a SARop with mission to support (or even replace) R118.

However, rather than assume SAR profiles are not safe, concentrate on what they did fly which was not a SAR profile letdown to Blacksod but a strange company procedure 10 miles away from where they needed to be.

Had this APBSS approach not existed, any views on what sort of approach are they likely to have made to Blacksod?

Crab & Geoffers. Doh ! I'm not making a point about what an O&G crew would do on an ARA approach to a hypothetical deck, or whether such a crew could get in on that night.

Like SASless I'm talking about what ANY crew (corporate, O&G, SAR) OUGHT to be doing when making an approach to a well surveyed and much used onshore site (Blacksod).

Just because SAR crews CAN make approaches like this crew, and on many occasions I'm sure HAVE to, doesn't mean they SHOULD or should have to when making fuels stops onshore. Flexibility can be provided by adjusting minima for the role if required.

And I'm not making competitive points about SAR vs O&G vs Corporate either. Corporate are quite capable of flying perfectly serviceable helicopters into cranes and O&G can drop perfectly serviceable helicopters into the drink off well designed approaches.

If Blacksod is used so regularly by SAR crews, presumably in all conditions, why were the hazards and shortcomings of the questionable 'standard' procedure that this crew was using not highlighted and amended a long time ago?

Punto - I think the fact that they hit a rock they didn't know was there calls into question the 'well-surveyed' element and I'm not sure how often Blacksod does get used, especially by East coast crews.

However, I fully take your point about the conduct of the approach, but until we know what the CVR says, we won't know why they chose this approach or elected to letdown to 200' so early in the procedure.

There were many more options available to them since the S92 is such a capable machine, the SAR type letdown isn't inherently dangerous but what it appears they did doesn't follow what I would call normal SAR protocols.

If the rock hadn't been there, they would still have been faced with a 10-mile transit at 200' in the dark, downwind with any go-around being towards land - not my favourite sort of option.

It does get you thinking about why that approach was even documented for these aircraft.

More detail of the combination of contract requirements and regulatory regime would help us to form a better picture of what guided their choices. Currently, most of us can only guess at what their options were.

CRAB, I think you are correct. What this crew seemed to have done did not conform to any kind of sensible solution for Blacksod and certainly not what I understand to be a SAR letdown.

Obnoxious fwit, I agree, using the EXACT definition of a CDFA does not suit ARA, or indeed a SAR approach. However, apart from the FW desire to descend to an apparent DA on an NPA, the underlying principles of CDFA add significant safety benefits. Nonetheleast of which is the REQUIREMENT to define both horizontal and vertical profiles.

Searchandrescue, I hope I am PERFECT if your implication is to not be so ends up like the subject of this thread.

Like Punto and other posters have said. For a fixed regular refuelling point you would have expected a properly constructed approach.

CRAB the minima for an ARA at night is a mitigation of risk, commensurate with the requirement to slow down from Vy speed stable to effect the final landing in the reduced visual cues available in the dark. SAR crews could well go lower, commensurate with the mitigations of the task. However, discarding all the good stuff currently in a well organised ARA just because the published O&G minima is too high would be a mistake. Having said that. I know that your Radar letdown follows a structured descent, not normally ending up tracking 10 nms at 200 feet.

[QUOTE=jimf671;9757064]It does get you thinking about why that approach was even documented for these aircraft.

I am not familiar with the whole Company Route Guidance information and only accident investigators have access to Crew Briefing CVR-material concerning this flight/approach, but...

If the crew had passed Blackrock at "safe altitude" or avoided it laterally, they most likely could have flown rest of the route with LNAV/FMS coupled; all the way to Blacksod. I am pretty sure that this aircraft is capable to follow the routing (within RFM speed limitations of course)... even the tight left turn north east of Blacksod at BLSDC waypoint. So, I think the approach routing is not a problem for this aircraft!

It seems that people are getting bogged down with the intricacies of the approach this crew elected to fly.

The fact remains that, with the latitude of operational flexibility that SAR crews are allowed, occasionally poor decisions are made. Mostly, they don't culminate with loss of life. In this case the priority of the investigation is to establish whether this was simply poor decision making or whether there are wider cultural/organisational issues.

Without a doubt there will be some very worthwhile lessons to be learned. Regardless of which aviation world you inhabit.

S&R,

Aircraft only do what they are told to do by Humans.

That shall always be the Achilles Heel of automation.

I TOTALLY AGREE!:ok:

My earlier post was only a reply to Jimf671.

S&R - my view (and I think that of some others) is that this APBSS routing was not created for these SAR aircraft as an approach to Blacksod, but is just a long established old VFR route between two lighthouses, Blacksod and Blackrock. Which is why it has route direction arrows each way and no vertical profile info. As I think ? Crab/DB/Punto said, it makes no sense as a VFR approach to go 10 miles further west than necessary, and it cannot be an IFR approach without a vertical profile. I suspect its use was just because it existed and then it was melded with a standard SAR let down to 200ft without enough thought, aggravated by the crew's local unfamiliarity and rushing to launch.

If the route was already preprogrammed into the FMS as a result of previous taskings or appeared as a selectable option...

Hey, someone else has already worked out a routing previously, we'll just follow that. Must be okay, it's stored in the FMS.

Can it really have been as simple as that?

It could have appeared as a simple, safe option to a crew unfamiliar with the area operating in pretty poor weather conditions. Why reinvent the wheel when someone else has apparently already done all the hard work?

Descend to gain sight of the surface over open water, select the route and concentrate on the rest of the mission. An expectation that the route was "safe" because someone must have flown it before, would certainly go a long way to explaining the apparent initial confusion and lack of urgency in changing course in response to the FLIR operator warning of an obstruction ahead.

A land based analogy could easily be drawn with professional lorry drivers blindly following sat nav directions and colliding with low bridges or other hazards when it should be obvious that the route is unsuitable.

GOULI, I really hope not. The ONLY time I put my & my crew's life in the hands of an IMC procedure, is when I know that it has been designed to a prescribed set of approved criteria, with all of the quality controls that go with that. I find it barely believable that a highly respected crew such as this would do otherwise .... I hope I'm not proven wrong.

Would not a previous route entry be in volotile memory? ( usual caveat.I have no knowledge of RW systems or operations).

O&G ARA Procedure
 

Here's the Airborne Radar Approach plate we use when flying offshore to rigs and ships in our S92's, S76C++'s and AW139's. We have to use the radar to reference all distances on the final approach. Our MSA offshore is 1500'. You can join the final approach by flying overhead the station at 1500', flying an arc onto final or doing a straight in approach. On a straight in final approach, be it 6 miles or 20 miles, we must ensure we have no radar targets on our approach path and that it's clear of targets 1 mile either side of track. We can descend down to 1000' Radalt if the aforementioned conditions are met. At 6 miles back we can descend down to 600' Radalt and at 4 miles back we are good to descend to our MDA of 300' Radalt at night and 200' Radalt in the day. It doesn't matter if we are IMC or VMC, we still descend down to our minimums after 4 miles. There's the standard offset of 10 degrees at 1.5 miles and then a further 30 degrees and climb at the MAP of 0.8 miles if we aren't visual. Copilots and Captains use the Radar in GMAP 2 and constantly adjust the tilt and variable gain for the best picture. The radar range is brought down from 10 miles to 1.5 miles incrementally on the final approach as the helicopter gets closer. If any target appears in front of the helicopter or within the 1 mile boundary either side of track the Flight Crew initiates an immediate climb at takeoff power to 1500'. Happened to one of our crews just last week when a supply boat came into the 1 mile zone on a 10 mile straight in approach at night in IMC conditions. There's no chance of flying into a rig, vessel or rock using this approach unless the radar is not being used correctly.

And if you try to overlay that procedure on Blacksod, especially with Westerly wind, it just doesn't work - hence the need for a SAR type letdown rather than an ARA.

RL77CHC

Thank you for the information and pictures. I note that the first graphic displays a circle at the top containing a reference to MSA information being displayed on Page 2. That is extremely relevant to earlier posts where many posters were absolutely insistent that all approach plates contained all relevant information on a single page. The information referring to the height of Black Rock Lighthouse was also apparently contained on a second page according to information contained in the preliminary report.

That certainly helps develop my mental picture of what could have happened. It will be interesting to see if this forms a significant part of the final investigation report.