My experience qualifies me only to discuss maintenance aspects of our operation, and I feel very strongly that we in British Airways Helicopters have been forced into developing major design modifications in the past and that insufficient time and experience has been left over to devote to improving our maintenance philosophies and systems.

This was inevitable in the early days, but I now wish to make our position perfectly clear. We, in engineering, are predominantly in the maintenance business and our development and research time will become more and more biased towards maintenance problems.