Close, but no cigar. You must remain strapped in and form your exit (jettison door or push out window) and be holding on to a known reference (eg, the opening) before releasing your seat belt. And then only after all the violence has stopped. If you are submerged and just release your seat belt you will become disorientated and have no way of knowing the way out. A passenger walking in off the street and taking a jolly has very little hope during a ditching, unless the floats inflated and the aircraft remained upright (eg the Hong Kong accident where all passengers survived). If they can't swim, even less hope (because they will panic when under water).

5 up in a 120 is quite heavy in the warm, could be a handful. i wonder how much wind there was.

With your years of experience maybe people could learn from what you have achieved and done.
You always were a great pilot.

Gulli - that's what this sentence meant you have to orientate yourself towards your exit before you release your seat belt.

I didn't go for the full nine yards of HUET drills as I was keeping my answer simple to match the question.

I've been doing HUET drills since 1983 and most recently in January so I'm quite aware of the procedures.

Okay, thanks for the info (re seatbelt release).

As I said earlier, I survived one ditching in fixed wing, probably as well-handled as it could be with fixed gear that was going to flip the plane on contact with the water (Otter). I thought maybe with a reasonably controlled auto into the water with a helicopter it might not be that violent. But that's a best-case scenario. So, belts on until motion stops, got it.

Let’s hope we can get information promptly re the cause so we can all work to reducing all accidents.

The ATSB have not yet released the report on the Richard Green EC135 fatal. It happened over two years ago!

What is going on?

Did HUET in Auckland in `94 as practice for getting out of the telly heli.
The most disconcerting bit was the roll when blindfolded.
Understandable that most pax would utterly freak out - and be unable to escape if turned upside down.

The HUET courses I did 25 years ago were excellent when I had occasion to travel/work out of the company AS355 as 'SLF'

Blindfolded and one door randomly locked so you had to crawl over the seat to the other one if your door wouldn't open. But it is pretty easy in a warm water swimming pool compared to the ocean and a real helo ! After a few times, you can do it more calmly, but it is a stretch to expect untrained people to remain calm and egress successfully.

I’m a scuba diving, surfing, strong swimming, experienced pilot.

The panic was barely contained on my first HUET.
Despite being confident and prepared, ending up, strapped in a cage, upside down with water up the nose is very disconcerting.

A surprise ditching, ending up inverted, for a non HUET passenger - a fluke to survive.

Since there is a degree of discussion on underwater escape, some inaccuracies already corrected, it may be worth reinforcing essential actions taught during HUET.

1. Do not release safety harnesses until all motion has ceased.
2. Before releasing your harness, identify your location and firmly grasp a structural point which will lead you to your escape point.
3. When (2) is complied with and the harness released, follow your grip to the exit point.
4. Release (if necessary) the emergency exit and hold the frame securely.
5. Check with the free hand that the exit is clear and unobstructed.
6. Pull yourself through the exit and then inflate your lifejacket when clear of the airframe.

There is much, much more to HUET but these essentials have been refined over many years and will work. Like crab@ I've done this a few times, like every 2-3 years since 1969, am still current, and generally enjoy the course.


How an operator puts across these essentials to a paying passenger is the big question, along with having the right equipment in the first place. Even the choice of aircraft which can ensure better safety such as a twin with pop out floats or a single with fixed floats, rather than (in this case) a single with popouts.



Corporate knowledge can be lost and the lessons hard won in the past can be overlooked when experience is thrown out with ageing pilots and engineers.

John, we are both too old to pass on advice that may save lives!

Parylisis by analysis. I spend a large portion of my day determining the root cause of mechanical failures, there’s 2 stages - a tear down report which shows what the component looks like when it is disassembled followed by a detailed failure analysis a week or 2 later. Rarely does the failure analysis come up with any epiphanies that weren’t evident from the tear down report. We don’t often find new ways of breaking things, we just repeat the old methods over & over.

My point is the ATSB spend years developing a report which mostly mirrors what professional pilots/engineers suspected was the root cause all along. They have to get it right & people don’t always tell the truth so evidence & accuracy is more important than a timeline but the current timelines aren’t reasonable. I’ve been involved in 1 investigation through the ATSB which had all people on board including the pilot tell the same story, & yet it took 2 years for the Report to be released, & when it was released it summarised exactly what the pilot said on day 1. I’m sure that file spent most of its time sitting around on a desk somewhere.

Maybe we should set a 2 day timeline, whatever the consensus is on pprune after after 2 days is the root cause.:ok:

...other things that stick in the mind from HUET.
The warning not to hold onto the door handles as you hit the water - because lots of people break their thumbs or fingers by doing so.
How bloody freezing 10 degrees Celsius sea temperature is when tipped into a nice flat pool with no swell or wind - in your clothes.
How hard it is to climb into a life-raft in your sodden freezing clothes from the same freezing water.

So it seems that experienced, pilots that have done either one or multiple HUET exercises state that it is difficult proposition to get out of a submersed helicopter, and that it might be very difficult to successfully extricate oneself in a real water emergency. Also that, they, with that experience believe it very unlikely that a paying passenger would, without that training be able to get themselves out. So what is a pilot in commands, duty of care to a passenger entail, in every over water flight.

Pre Flight Briefing should start

" Here is your life jacket I am now going to brief you on what happens if we ditch at sea; but may as well not listen because if it all goes bad I am really the only one that has a chance to get out because I have had all this HUET training that you haven't, and try as I may, even if I get out by the time I do that your toast anyway, if you don't work it out for yourself."

So can we as pilots in good conscious take passengers over water?
Do we care?
Is it unfair that with my training if it all goes bad I know I have a (good) chance to get out, but my passengers don't.
Why is it HUET for the pilot and not the passenger? ( I know the answer)

Why do the North Sea bears have to do HUET?
And the Australian offshore workforce?
Etc etc.....

We now use the MK50 Jacket with Category A EBS so at least pax have approx 2 minutes of breathing air. The downside is that the MK50 jackets are heavy and not 100% comfortable. Fine for offshore in a 92 but probably not much good in a 120 without any training.

These jackets are widely regarded amoungst the passengers as a joke. You’d need to be a proficient and well trained diver to have the presence of mind to operate them properly, not an offshore johnny doing HUET once every three years. Efforts are better spent getting out than fumbling around trying to get the EBS figured out.

Do you want to have a 30-minute briefing before the flight, the result of which would be to scare the fork out of the customers and they will refuse to fly?

I made a 4-minute video of how the different seatbelts, door handles, sliding and hinged doors, intercoms and lifejackets wortked. All the customers were interested in was the well-constructed girl strapping into the full front-seat harness (Lift, and separate, like the old Berlei ad) and using the oral inflation tube. But I had done my bit, and if they didn't listen it was out of my hands.

I do not consider HUET, EBS nor rebreather to be a joke. EBS has the longer duration but must not be deployed to early in order to exhaust the duration before splash.

Sorting it out when already upside down is theoretically possible but I think it is a remote possibility (also considering cold shock gasping in).

What worries me is that the EBS is still a dry training (in the Netherlands?) with indefinite duration. The HUET is still a rebreather course. (I would be extremely happy to be corrected, my knowledge dates back 2 years)

Self Loading Bear

Fairly breezy looking at the radar picture from yesterday arvo for the area - a few showers moving through rapidly but it didn't look bad enough to cause problems visibility wise, and certainly enough wind so some translational lift would be there all the way onto the pad.