Originally Posted by
megan
212, you would be best placed to know but wasn't there a Puma (Bristow?) that lost a door in Borneo or there abouts with fatalities to all, early eighties an aging brain thinks?
Hi Megan, I assume you are referring to this accident?
https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/33132 Section 1.18.4 of this report discusses it:
https://assets.publishing.service.go...011_G-REDL.pdf
The fact that you refer to a door coming off is intriguing because the only reference I have seen to that is in the Appendix to the formal report where Aerospatiale dispute the findings around the MGB failure and (lamely) attempt to blame it on a pilot's door coming of! Shades of the Norwegian EC225 aftermath and AH insinuating CHC had made errors.
With the Puma accident, the MGB had been making metal for weeks and the Chief Engineer had been diligently collecting the particles and sellotaping them to graph paper to monitor the quantity, in line with the maximum allowable from the AMM - 7 square millimetres. Unfortunately, he misinterpreted this as 7 millimetres squared. I think when the MGB failed it had about 29 square millimetres recorded and that was after it had already been flushed once and the count restarted! The UK AAIB did a substitution test using UK CAA engineering surveyors, and 50% of them made the same mistake! There was some waffle about confusing metric units, but I don't buy it as it's no different to square inches or inches squared, but it happened.
The flight was carrying Shell wives from Miri (Malaysia) to Bandar (Brunei) on a shopping trip, and the failure occurred just after crossing the border, so the aircraft fell into the swamp next to Kuala Belait. Accordingly, the Brunei Shell Aviation dept assisted in the recovery of wreckage etc, and they took a number of photos to show the scene before it was disturbed - I have seen them and they are not pleasant viewing!