Originally Posted by
LTP90
The US Forest Service grounded all of their Bell 205/212 fleet this evening. Supposedly because of something related to information from this crash.
Here is what USFS sent out:
From FS Airworthiness: Bell Helicopters has discovered a serious issue with the B212 and B205 TT strap pins, inboard. Four to five days ago, a B212 operating in Canada, had a TT strap pin catastrophic failure that resulted in the blade separating in flight. That pin had only 27hrs on it. Another vendor inspected their pins because of the incident and found them deformed after only 29hrs time in service. Apparently, the part number of these pins have either FWFS or FNFS incorporated. A representative from Bell Helicopters was contacted and said that there should be a message coming out from the FAA and/or Bell very soon regarding the pin failure. According to Bell it is very likely that we will see an Emergency AD issued by the FAA tomorrow. Because of this, it is my opinion that we should stand down our Bell medium fleet until we hear from the manufacture or the FAA regarding the failure of these pins. This is emerging information and new info will be shared as it becomes available.