Handbook of Offshore Helicopter Transport Safety: Essentials of Underwater Egress and Survival provides a comprehensive look at the issues and concerns facing offshore helicopter transport. The book offers guidance for offshore helicopter operators, survival instructors, and the global offshore workforce, including discussions of safety management systems, safety briefings, survival equipment, underwater egress training, water impact/ditching statistics, and search and rescue. Each area of interest details pertinent information spanning approximately 30 years of offshore operations. Early sections discuss helicopter transport safety, safety regulations, and standards, while subsequent chapters cover Helicopter Underwater Escape Training (HUET) programs and their development and training, followed by final chapters on the effects of HUET, Emergency Breathing Systems (EBS), and Helicopter Transportation Suit (HTS).

A former South African Air Force pilot who saw action throughout the region from the 1970s, Neall Ellis is the best-known mercenary combat aviator alive. Apart from flying Alouette helicopter gunships in Angola, he has fought in the Balkan War (for Islamic forces), flown Mi-8s for Executive Outcomes, and thereafter an Mi-8 fondly dubbed“Bokkie” for Colonel Tim Spicer in Sierra Leone.

For the past two years, as a “civilian contractor,” Ellis has been flying helicopter support missions in Afghanistan, where, he reckons, he has had more close shaves than in his entire previous four-decade career; twice he turned the enemy back from the gates of Freetown, effectively preventing the rebels from overrunning Sierra Leone’s capital. Known as Nellis to his friends, he was also the first mercenary to work hand-in-glove with British ground and air assets in a modern guerrilla war.

This book describes the full career of this storied aerial warrior, from the bush and jungles of Africa to the forests of the Balkans and the merciless mountains of today’s Afghanistan. Along the way the reader encounters a multi-ethnic array of enemies ranging from ideological to cold-blooded to pure evil, as well as well as examples of incredible heroism for hire.