11 September 2014 Eric Clarke - Helicopter Safety

President elect Mary Fraser was in the chair for last week's meeting.

She welcomed two visitors; our speaker, Eric Clark and Christine Mbiza, our Global Grant scholar who has just arrived from Malawi to start her year-long Masters course at Stirling University.

Eric's talk was on Helicopter Safety; he was Advisory Service Director and Director of Air Safety for Shell Aircraft, part of Royal Dutch Shell, and worked out of Heathrow for 12 years or so until he retired in 2005. He had graduated from Glasgow University with a degree in Aeronautical Engineering and spent 29 years in the RAF as an engineering officer, serving in England, Scotland (at Kinloss), Germany and the USA.
During his time at Shell, he was awarded the Cumberbatch Trophy by the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators for his work on Helicopter Safety.
Eric's first case on joining Shell Aircraft was an accident investigation following a collision between a low flying RAF Tornado and a pipeline inspection helicopter. This followed a spate of serious incidents involving helicopters and Eric's remit was to come up with significant improvements to reduce accident levels. He investigated the causes of accidents, looked at issues such as airworthiness, escape procedures and other operational factors before developing 'best practice' guidelines and improved checking and auditing procedures. These were implemented for Shell and adopted by other operators, however different cultures meant this was not always easy.
Following his retirement in 2005, Eric noted that, despite improvements, there had been a number of serious accidents involving helicopters, most recently the 'Clutha Vaults' crash in Glasgow last year, which shows a lot of work still needs to be done.  
Ken Murray gave Eric a well-deserved vote of thanks for a very interesting talk.