Originally Posted by
Nige321
Bell 525
I suppose these don't count...
Nigel, I agree with you that Sultan seems in his posts to have a never ending vendetta against Sikorsky. He seems to take pleasure from twisting the knife. But in your efforts to strike back by bringing up the AW609 accidents as a comparison, you distort key facts.
Both the AW609 and the 525 accidents occurred while exploring extreme corners of their flight envelopes. Vdive recovery and simulated loss of an engine at Vmax respectively. The S-97 accident occurred lifting to a hover.
Both AW and Bell kept quiet and made no comments to the media regarding the probable causes of the accidents. And when the reports were published made no attempts to offer “Alternate Truths”. Sikorsky management by their actions following the S-97 crash in my opinion have not respected the name of the company founder.
Note that unlike Sultan, I did not blame the Sikorsky Senior Test Pilot for the misinformation in the article. I have little doubt it was either journalist error or Sikorsky
PR editing. Test Pilots deserve our respect.