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 has changed in recent years to reverse that temporary, positive trend? We must reaffirm the safety actions that are foundational to our policies and everyday procedures as the basis of our ongoing safety performance and innovate courageously as we seek to drive continuous improvement. Reflection and commitment to action is crucial as our industry transitions to serve new customers and we introduce new generations of technologies, operated by new generations of personnel.

As we shape a positive future for our industry, what are we doing to preserve the great safety practices that have served us all well to date? And what are we doing to ensure we safely introduce the right technologies and provide the most effective training for our teams?

Simply put, safety is the result of investment in, and effective management of, People, Technology, Tools, Training and Techniques.  With our people at the centre of consistent safety delivery, we must sharpen our focus and provide robust support for them as they manage existing risks every day; 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 support teams, ground operations staff, maintenance professionals and flight crews who deliver safety around the world 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, update 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.

Our Safety Performance Model highlights Loss Of Control, CFIT and System / Component Failure as the main threats to helicopter operation. What are you doing to counter these threats? Please explore the model and the related accident prevention goals (including their second tier elements), and ask yourself and your operation:

• How do we address this element in our operation?

• How do we measure our own performance in this area?

• What do we do well in managing this element?

• How can we partner for improvement?

• Where should we look for quality guidance on this topic?

HeliOffshore has also 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? Please tell us about any barriers preventing your participation.

Some safety performance indicators sit outside safety teams, and potentially include a deeper dataset related to the people who do safety every day. 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, safety survey data has great potential to provide insights to understand our frontline better and enable us to support them most effectively.  Additionally, they are strong proxy measures for present states of safety culture.

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, day in, day out and, of course, overnight to prevent the next accident.

Only together we can build on the successes achieved in the last 10 years - but there remains much for each of us to do.

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