SASless,
Thanks for your comments, it appears that what is old is new again for Army CRM(now called ACT-E, Aircrew Coordination Training-Enhanced. Because Army 🤣
What you described is generally what we do day to day, though we have no tactical concerns, strictly maintenance or ferry flights.
I feel like the hardest nut to crack on all of this CRM stuff is communicating. I find that it’s easy for me to read about an incident/accident and process that if someone had just spoken up it could have prevented the whole situation. In practice it’s much harder, sometimes maybe excessive professional courtesy or not wanting to be “that guy” makes it hard to express something isn’t right.
I need to emphasize at this point that my organization is by no means dangerous and unregulated, far from it. The safety culture is in my opinion top notch and by and large everyone is on the same page as
far as procedures and safety are concerned. But a lot of people on here, pilots and crew alike have probably had at least one brush with weather that wasn’t so great and got in a bad situation because on that day a choice was made that they wouldn’t have normally made. Nobody spoke up.
It’s funny how it’s mostly weather, seems maintenance doesn’t get “pushed”, it’s either broken or it isn’t, although some on here could probably speak to the pressures to push maintenance they’ve experienced.
So, back to the point of communicating to break that chain. There have been a couple of times over the years where simply asking “what are we doing?” has broken the chain, or saying “I’m not comfortable with the weather now, let’s wait a bit here.” that’s all it took and there was no conflict or argument about it. In the end it built a better crew relationship, it’s just funny that even after positive experiences we humans don’t learn sometimes!
Great discussion going on this enjoying it.
As far as the comments on this incident go someone suggested hydraulics issues, I would agree with it, it would be disconcerting and out of the norm, although on the UH-60 I would put it in the same boat as an engine problem in that you have a well designed redundant system that will get you on the ground safely without drama. In the worse case scenario where a leak couldn’t automatically or manually be isolated there is time, though not unlimited, available to get it on the ground.
A failure in the input module to the main transmission could conceivably be a cause of what they experienced but I would assume that would be sorted out quickly and fleet wide safety messages would be out to inspect components.
The MH-60 that crashed from a hover at Hunter army airfield in Savannah several years ago is a good example, it seems we were bore scoping tail rotor gearboxes to inspect that the 7/16” nut/bolt holding the tail rotor pitch change shaft to the tail rotor servo had a cotter pin installed within a very short period of that accident occurring as the separation of that hardware was what caused the accident.
Time will tell as they say.
60