Personal Locator Beacons
Oil & Gas UK have confirmed that personal locator beacons will be progressively reintroduced on North Sea helicopter flights from Monday, 8 February 2010.
The reintroduction will take place on 3 consecutive weekends, with the Aberdeen hub being the first to receive the equipment on Monday, 8 February, followed by the Southern North Sea helicopter hubs and Scatsa in Shetland. The beacon reintroduced on these hubs is the Sea Marshall AU9-HT, which has been approved by the CAA and tested extensively for inadvertent operation and interference with helicopter systems.
For Liverpool Bay, the Rhotheta RT-B77 (also CAA approved and tested) is currently being manufactured and will be rolled out as soon as the required quantities are available.
Robert Paterson, Oil & Gas UK's Health and Safety Director, explained:
"As PLBs are still being manufactured, it is not feasible to reintroduce these across the entire industry at once, however we felt it important to start the roll out as soon as possible, and this means doing it by individual hubs.
"Not only have the technical difficulties with PLBs interfering with other transmitters been resolved, we have also adopted much more robust life-jacket mounted PLBs, which will drastically decrease the likelihood of inadvertent operation during a flight. In addition, we have prepared a training DVD on the correct use of the beacons which each worker has to watch before boarding the helicopter."
Bob Keiller, Chairman of the Helicopter Task Group which has been co-ordinating the PLB programme, commented: "The reintroduction process has been a major challenge technically and organisationally and required tremendous effort by the whole industry. Only the cooperation between oil and gas companies, helicopter operators, regulator and the trade unions allowed us to find an adequate technical solution to ensure that the personal beacons are effective and do not interfere with other systems on board the helicopter. Most importantly, as an industry we have collectively agreed to make PLBs standard issue for all UK oil and gas helicopter flights. With the reintroduction we are making a major step forward in ensuring the safety of our offshore workforce."
Posted 04/02/2010
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