Shorthand for not allowed to do helo ops.
To keep it simple, the other is 'green deck' but has different classes and levels for the restrictions (day only, full capability etc). It comes from SHOPs (shipborne helo operation procedural?) manual for the CAF. It's under review generally but AOPs has some equipment issues from build, as well as big training and SOP gaps to figure out.
It's a combination of the equipment arrangement generally meeting the standard, as well as being in date for maintenance etc, having tactics and procedures in place, as well as people qualified to do that. Right now there are equipment issues, no tactics or procedures (so you can't qualify a team) and also there was never any updates to the trainers to bring in some of the new equipment that comes with AOPs for helos.
Some is on the RCN side, but Canada shouldn't have accepted the ships as meeting IOC, and also should have probably started fixing things on the ships still under delivery. So far it's been 3 years though and things are still getting accepted even knowing they need fixed. Some of them are pretty fundamental too like missing handrails, holes on the flight deck netting being too big (so someone could fall through them when they are down for helo ops), lighting issues etc.
Some of it was because the requirements were missed, but instead of updating the requirements and getting it fixed in build, it's getting passed to in service to figure out, so we'll keep paying ISI to build something that we know doesn't work, then pay someone else to remove it and fix it, vice just paying them to fix it the first time.
Shouldn't be similar for CSC, as the requirements were different and included a lot of specific things above and beyond commercial class rules, but a lot of this is more lack of actual will from GoC with things like backing from PSPC or PMO pushing back that is stopping it from being fixed. Hard to do I guess when the company just calls some MPs directly when DND grows a backbone and it costs them money.
From the RCN side I don't get it though, as we aren't ready for the ships anyway and don't have crews for them, so accepting a ship with hundreds of defects (which is an improvement on thousands) doesn't actually benefit them, other than a nice photo for twitter.
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