Well quite but the general point being that with your expected endurance of 1 hour (via one assumes a combo of calculated/finger in the air from experience of your expected mix of best endurance v max fuel flow) if you see a fuel alarm at 50mins then surely your first thought is "oh i hadnt realised id been so greedy with the fuel today" rather than "the alarm is erroneous lets push on".?? Even with the fuel remaining had the aircraft landed successfully at its home goodness knows how these guys are living if landing with so little is standard.

Landing with so little???? 80kgs is more than the VFR FRF.

Obviously not an Offshore pilot because the FRF is often all that's left unless the air gods have been kind and left a little contingency to sweeten the deal!

Correct, not an Offshore Pilot - and if that's the "Offshore Attitude" to FRF / MLA then glad I stayed clear of it.

FRF Should give you 20 minutes at loiter (VFR) and 30 minutes (IFR) and still be able to land safely.

HI Delta
Unless my memory has let me down again, the VFR requirement is based on 20 mins cruise whilst the IFR requirement is 30 mins at holding speed - in the end they tend to produce a similar value.
Cheers
TeeS

FortyOdd, I like your feeling towards this and cannot fault you for wanting to avoid being low on fuel. It sucks and always will. However, its not an "Attitude" in HOFO its sometimes a commercial necessity and the Commander needs to be comfortable with it otherwise he can take "Additional Fuel required by the Commander" as is his prerogative under the rules. Majority of HOFO Pilots I have worked with like to take as much fuel as they can get in but sometimes the client wants all the available payload. That's the nature of the job. However, you can bet your pay packet that on those occasions we is watching the fuel gauges with deep suspicion until we land safely. We employ lots of little tricks to justify a little more fuel like planning with winds more punitive than forecast so the system calculates more fuel. It takes a really brave soul to plan minimum wx/absolute minimum fuel without at least a tweak here and their for the "wife and kids". Often this happens subconsciously during the planning. One day the bean counters will eventually stand over our shoulders and the cat will get out of our nav bag. Rue the day!!

Are we not nit picking? Using your 80kgs and the averged 3.3kg/min consumption at the point it fell through a roof, and that roof was a distance away from the planned landing site and absolutely no margin for any precautionary alternative....at night.

You can make general points at the margin but fundementally you know how much fuel has been uplifted and the watch gives you the rest. If your SOPs and crew allow you to operate such that a couple of dozen kgs of fuel make the difference it hardly seems logical that this same crew are not then super attentive to all of the information presented to them around fuel including where that fuel is.
That will not be answered because all are dead but what can be is the acceptance or otherwise of the fuel management process. I doubt very much that a similarly operated aircraft could crash with similarly low levels of fuel remaining as far away from its base today, which suggests SOPs will have been revised, suggesting the process that allowed this situation to occur was flawed.

We are not nit picking. FRF figures are guidlines which are determined by Operators and Regulators with safety in mind as a sensible amount of fuel to land with as a minimum.

Fundamentally we all know how much fuel has been uplifted, and everyone who has flown for 20 years commercially is super attentive, but suddenly one day we don't just ignore a whole load of fuel warnings without some other factor in play.

"There are many holes in the cheese that needed to line up. Some of them are already there, now, in our own working environments. Finding the holes and plugging them is the mission."
2 layers of cheese with 2 holes each is easy to avoid holes lining up
4 layers with 300 holes each is very difficult.

Tight on fuel to assure engine accountability during takeoff is clearly a false safety trade-off.
Complexity leads to pilot error. Pilot error is about 4/5ths of accidetnts.
Complexity increases the probability of System Failures. About 1/5th of Fatal accidents are system failures.

Engines 1%.
Complexity kills. (to paraphrase Occam: "a helicopter should have a single reliable engine")

There is a level of engine reliability at which the extra risks (of 2 engines) are not worth it.
Anyone got a handle on what that figure is? IS THERE AN EXPERT out there?
Should be easy to calculate. Probably somewhere around the 10^-3 to 10^-6 mark. Trying to improve on that risks shooting one's self it the foot with an overcomplicated gun.

"a pilot who understands the EC135 fuel system should NEVER end up with fuel starvation provided..."
and the number of pilots that don't is? : 1 per 100,000? 1 per 1000? 1 per 10?

Unfortunately, like an icicle used as a dagger, hard evidence of the fuel displays status & the water which caused the capacitance probes to fail has long since evaporated.

But I'd like to think others would consider the possibility that the professional pilot perhaps wasn't entirely to blame for this horrific event.

I agree with these 2 sentiments. From them and the pages of educational discussions on the EC135 fuel system, it is clear that it IS complex enough to expect a pilot failure rate. I don't think it's the pilots fault, just the complexity of what is required of him will result in accidents.

DB also 'Fuel Pressure', is a real world cause of accidents. AND "in the real world where problems are real. Not imagined. Not hypothesised. Just real." like this real world multiple fatal accident or Leicester? OR the imaginary world where engine redundancy is an imagined magic cure?