Originally Posted by
SASless
HC.....thank you for confirming what I said....so perhaps what you missed is I was noting that exactly as stated in the Accident Report...new designs might not work as anticipated and that would include systems like Hums and similar technology and we should be very careful our consideration of their effectiveness.
I am old enough to remember rotor track and balance being done with a pole and flag and some grease pencils and lived long enough to see the Chadwick system come along and change the standard for the better.
Same for. Hums....I saw the old bent knuckle advance to the state of the art systems we enjoy today.
That being said....just as your comment reminds us there is a limit to every system's ability to give advance warning of failures.
But as in your example....the chip detector system had to be altered and improved didn't it?
Did Eurocopterr ever come out with the exact cause of the failures....the actual root cause?
I recall they were being a bit quiet about it despite stating they had it figured out and fixed.
I know it was a sad day for you when those Cabs got hauled off for use as potting sheds.
I felt the same when that happened to the Chinook on the North Sea.
The only good of that was Columbia got some darn good helicopters cheap and. have flown them since and made a lot of money tn the process.
Forecasts are the Chinook design shall be flying well over a hundred years after coming to service with the US Military.
My point was that HUMS was never expected to identify planet gear flaws, it was not designed into the system. Which is a bit different from expecting it to work and then finding out the hard way that it didn’t.