This report gives a consolidated picture of the safety performance of helicopter passenger transport in the global offshore energy industry. The data reveals a clear picture: there is more work we can and must do to meet our critical mission of ensuring no lives are lost in offshore aviation.

Historically, in times of crisis, safety performance is upheld with increased vigilance and sensitivity to the ever-changing and acute situation. We recognised a positive trend in safety performance in recent years, during and immediately following the pandemic; including in the offshore helicopter industry.  With the pandemic behind us, do we recognise what we did well during those very challenging times to protect our safety performance?  Let’s ask ourselves: what are we doing to sustain that positive trend today and reaffirm the safety actions that must be part of our policies and everyday procedures to deliver consistent improvements in safety performance? Reflection and commitment to action is crucial as our industry transitions to serve new customers and we introduce new technologies, operated by new personnel.

Simply put, safety is the result of investment in, and effective management of, People, Technology, Tools, Training and Techniques.  We must sharpen our focus on our collective support for the people who manage existing risks effectively; detecting and reacting to new risks as they emerge. We must make it a priority to learn more about the realities of everyday work in our frontlines and support the thousands of operations support, ground operations, maintenance and flight crews to deliver safety every single day.

We know that the information contained within this report can be improved: accuracy and fidelity can be enhanced; industry intelligence can be expanded; further analysis can be performed.

And we need your help to continuously develop this report. HeliOffshore will continue to use this and other data to inform and, where appropriate, revise our safety strategy so we deliver the greatest safety benefit for the industry. It is critical that we continue to benchmark our progress year after year through the ongoing collection and analysis of data within the HeliOffshore Safety Intelligence Programme. Data allows us to check our safety initiatives and actions are delivering the desired outcomes.

HeliOffshore has begun to track lower level ‘precursor’ events that can lead to LOC-I, CFIT and System / Component Failure in a programme called InfoRate. We continue to work with operators to prioritise detection of these risks within their Safety Management System and identify the activities that need to be robustly supported in training and operations. Are you contributing to this important programme?

Some of the indicators sit outside safety teams, and potentially include a deeper dataset related to the people who do safety everyday. We endorse the view that ‘people do safety’. We can do more with data types that potentially inform how our people are doing in terms of their own readiness.  Data traditionally collected by departments outside ‘safety’, such as employee engagement data, has the potential to provide insights to understand our frontline better and enable us to support them most effectively.

As an industry, we owe it to those who place their trust in us every day to do everything we can to support the frontline teams who work tirelessly to prevent the next accident.

Together we can build on the successes achieved in the last 10 years - but there remains much to do.

Contact the report author, Dr Matthew Greaves, at matt.greaves@helioffshore.org with your comments, questions and contributions.