The Government’s Transport Select Committee recently published its report into offshore helicopter safety. It followed the deaths of four passengers when a Super Puma helicopter ditched into the North Sea on 23 August 2013.
Ian Waldram, a committee member of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health’s (IOSH) Offshore Group, gives his views on the committee’s report.
Last August’s tragic accident near Sumburgh Airport was the second fatal crash off the coast of the UK in the last five years. There have also been three ditchings where there were no fatalities.
It prompted the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to undertake its own wide-ranging review into offshore helicopter safety.
The results of this were published in February 2014 and at the time, though I’m not an aviation specialist, I judged the CAA provided an extensive and a largely evidence-based review, which contained valuable information and some good recommendations to improve the safety of offshore helicopter operations in the UK. But some recommendations seemed less evidence-based and some appear to require changes for offshore sector flights alone, rather than all commercial helicopter operations over water.
Five months on from the CAA’s findings, MPs on the Transport Select Committee released their own report into the safety of offshore helicopters. Within it, I feel there is a lot of going over old ground, but they do identify some valid areas for improvement, notably in how AAIB and CAA maintain contact with those who have been involved in an accident as their investigations proceed.
The main point that I disagree with is the committee’s call for a full and independent public inquiry to be held into offshore helicopter operations.
Having been involved in several public inquiry responses with others from IOSH, I know from experience they are usually very slow instruments for getting improvements.
The amount of preparation that you have to do, and the time spent as a result, is not always a creative use of resources.
Those industry experts who would be called to give evidence before any such inquiry are already extremely busy introducing a range of initiatives for improving the safety of offshore helicopter operations.
For example, the day before the committee released its report, the Helicopter Safety Steering Group published its plan to introduce improved emergency breathing systems on-board all offshore helicopters by 1 September, as required by the CAA.
Helicopters are already heavily regulated, and the main challenge in improving safety is combatting human factors, affecting both crews and maintenance personnel.
It’s not immediately obvious to me that calling these experts for another public inquiry would add much value to what is already in hand, and to a challenging timescale.
The committee recommends the inquiry should be convened partly to learn whether commercial pressures from oil and gas companies affect the safety of offshore helicopter operations.
In my opinion, to suggest operators are cutting corners for commercial reasons is just nonsense. It is not only the passengers they’d be putting at risk if that was the case, it is their own pilots too.
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