Two more Norwegian S-92's return to base for landing

[flyby_heli]

There has been a lot of "incidents" in Norway lately.
One S-92 flew 90 min. (or was it 90 miles?) on one engine with passengers onboard, another one return to shore for landing after a false engine-fire light. All within the last month!! And today, according to the newspapers, 2 more had to return for landing. One with a false engine fire light again, and one with redused power due to metal chips in the transmission.
What's the deal with all these false lights? Hopefully the pilots and operators will continue to follow their procedures even if they think it's a false indication, cause if they don't you can be certain something will go wrong and it will come back and bite them.....That's just how good old Murphy works!!

Article in norwegian: http://www.bt.no/lokalt/bergen/article313924.ece

[Mikila1A]

Lads,

Any further info to distribute here.

MK1

[vertalop]

If the accuracy of the article matches the accuracy of the helicopter recognition in the photo it is probably not worth the paper it is written in!

[Tynecastle]

Whats the big deal with spurious fire warnings, the good old 61 and Pumas had them on a fairly regular basis, but it didn't make front page news in those days, think this was the main reason that cockpit mirrors were installed on both types.
Over the years I can recall several cases where different types had to fly back single engine, but no one outside of the company knew about it.
The problem we all have to deal with nowadays is that everything has to be reported, even a minor problem like one of your instuments fluctuating on start, will require an incident report, a few years ago the indicator would be replaced and away you go.
If false warnings are biggest problem on 92. it must be some machine.

[John Eacott]

Whats the big deal with spurious fire warnings, the good old 61 and Pumas had them on a fairly regular basis, but it didn't make front page news in those days, think this was the main reason that cockpit mirrors were installed on both types.

ISTR that the Sea King mirrors were fitted so that we could check that the gear was down & locked, having had some sort of instruction to always 'visually check' as well as two greens. Somewhat tedious, getting a bone dome out of the sliding window to look down to see if the wheel was still there :p After years of operating without mirrors, it was treated as a bit of a joke when they finally appeared on the scene: about 1973, I think ;)

[ATN]

Whats the big deal with spurious fire warnings, the good old 61 and Pumas had them on a fairly regular basis, but it didn't make front page news in those days

In those days PPRuNe was still to be born.

ATN

[helopat]

On the whole, this sounds exactly like the Sikorsky machine I fly at the moment...the Seahawk. Put a new transmission in and she'll make metal for a while (ie. chips). These ol girls have such big, chunky transmissions that It'd take a small nuclear detonation to destroy them. And fire lights? Obviously not to be taken LIGHTLY (thats a pun...get it?) we have them all too frequently...usually a bit of water in the cannon plug.

Ya know, it all boils down to the newsies having portable scanners and picking up the pan call (or the RTB call) and blowing it all out of proportion in order to make it SEEM LIKE news.

I tend to agree that this doesn't seem at all like a problem for the airframe overall.

HP

[northseaspray]

The norwegian oil workers have unions that take safety issues very seriously, and if they don't want to fly with the S-92, they'll get rid of it. Last night they got to voice their concern on national broadcast tv, it was the very top story:

http://www1.nrk.no/nett-tv/forside/

upper right corner, click on play. This link is only valid today.

[Aser]

From the web:
S-92 Incidents

Thursday November 9th we experienced a return flight due to indication failure in the engine fire detection system. NOR 546 departed Flesland at 14:42 local time enroute for Gullfaks A, with 18 passengers and 2 crew.
At 15:20 the fire warning light for engine 1 started to flash intermittently. Based on similar incidents lately the crew rapidly concluded that this was an indication of false warning. However, knowing that the engine fire detection system was not working properly the crew elected to abort the flight and return to Bergen for technical investigation.
Air Traffic Control was informed about the indication failure and clearance was obtained to return to maintenance base at Flesland. The rest of the flight back to Flesland was carried out as normal. It has to be emphasized that not any kind of priority or emergency was declared by the crew and it was purely considered as a "technical return to base" situation and the passengers were briefed accordingly. It was a surprise to the crew to discover that the airport authority had raised the emergency preparedness to "full alert" on arrival at Flesland at 15:37.

Passengers were disembarked upon arrival and escorted to the terminal where they received a detailed briefing by the crew. Passengers awaiting other S-92 departures received briefing from our Chief Pilot S-92.

Norsk Helikopter has during the last months experienced three (3) incidents related to the engine fire detection system. All three incidents has been generated by indication failure in the fire warning system for the engines. Based on these incidents Norsk Helikopter introduced an internal inspection procedure of all sensors in the system on 50 hours interval. The manufacturer, Sikorsky Aircraft has been consulted on the failures and a investigation team is arriving in Stavanger tomorrow to review and inspect the failed parts (sensors).

We as operator has full confidence in the Sikorsky S-92 product that we are operating and as fleet leader, we will by November 20th pass the threshold of 10.000 revenue hours on our total S-92 fleet.

However, the failures we have experienced in the engine fire warning system is not acceptable and we will together with Sikorsky Aircraft and Vendors do our outmost to ensure that this is rectified and proper corrective actions implemented immediately.

We ensure you all that Safety in our operations is our number one objective and it will always be

[northseaspray]

Offshore workers are still voicing their concern about the S-92, here's an article in one of the leading financial newspaper in Norway.

http://www.dn.no/forsiden/energi/article925582.ece?WT.svl=article_readmore

[northseaspray]

Follow up story from the competing paper;


http://www.hegnar.no/hegnar/newsdet.asp?id=235579&cat=94

[runesos]

... to be honest, norwegian media is crap in all levels. If they have somthing to make a story on, they'll blow it up like hell. Why are there no reporting on the numerous MD-81 faults that have occured over the past 20 years ? My bet is that those sikorskys are the volvo of the skies, and the norwegian newspapers are the kids on the street with no knowledge whatsoever. The norwegians who know about hellicopters, very clearly state that they see no danger in flying the sikorsky s92, but that they intend to get rid of faulty error messages.