As far as this 222 story is concerned, I can’t get the link to work because I can’t get it to appear on my screen, which just shows a blank space.
As far as luck and aviation is concerned, I’ve always tried not to depend on luck. In my RW career, (all but over these days after 45 years), one time the grim reaper almost got me to my knowledge, but luck saved me, was when I was flown back to Odiham by a an apparently ignorant, or poorly sighted instructor in an RAF Puma.
We were a few minutes into a low level navex toward the end of my initial operational conversion course. The Puma gave me a red master caution light and a “BIM” caption to deal with. “BIM” stood for Blade Integrity Monitor. Back then, in pre “plastic” blade days, the MRBs had a hollow Aluminium D spar, which formed the front aerofoil section with individual, fabricated aluminium pockets bonded on behind to form the rear section.
The hollow spars were filled with pressurised nitrogen gas and they had a four inch long, “top hat” shaped, spring loaded visual indicator at the root end. If gas pressure was good, they showed white and yellow stripes along their length. If pressure was lost, the innards of the indicator moved under spring pressure to show vivid red stripes against a white background, for obvious reasons these were checked pre and after flight.
Due to the obvious importance of blade integrity, a caption lit if a BIM went red in flight but these warnings were often spurious. However, if the caption did come on in flight, it was a requirement to land asap and check the actual BIMs were not red. If one was red it meant a field blade change because the spar had lost pressure, possibly indicating a crack.
When the BIM warning showed, as a fresh out of the box ab initio I felt I’d done a text book recovery. I immediately climbed from low level, put out a PAN call and landed in a grass field with the proverbial telephone box by the gate. Having done so I immediately retarded the throttles and shut down. My instructor nodded his approval but told me to stay strapped in with the battery on and listen out on the radio because our PAN call hadn’t been answered. If anyone called I was to liaise. He and the trainee crewman climbed out, did a quick walk round the aircraft then wandered off down to the phone box to speak to our base engineers. They returned after a couple of minutes, during which time I’d heard nothing on the radio. My instructor said he’d spoken to the base engineers and been told we were ok to RTB. He told me to sit back and relax because he was going to fly the aircraft back from the left seat. He “horsed” it back, obviously enjoying himself - instructors didn’t get much hands on time at our stage of the course, especially at low level.
After landing the aircraft back at base he gave me control, climbed out and told me and the young crewman to shut it down and wait there while he walked back to the line office to arrange another airframe so we could carry on with our navex. After I shut the aircraft down I climbed out and carried out the usual post flight walk round. To my horror, one of the BIMS was showing red! I pointed this out to the crewman who said, “Yes, it was like that in the field, but the instructor spoke to the engineers then said it was OK to fly it back…..”
To say I was surprised…… I went straight in to the line office and interrupted the conversation! My instructor seemed under the impression that the BIMs were not showing red. His face fell and the line chief’s eyebrows shot up!
We were given a replacement airframe and completed the sortie. Nothing much was said to me in the subsequent debrief. A couple of days later the line chief came and found me. He asked me to come and look at what they had found. He produced a section of the blade, which had been sawn off a few inches either side of a major crack. The spar had been cracked almost across its entire section, from the back to the front, about a third of the way out from the root end of the blade. Once the pockets were removed, it had been possible to manually pull the spar apart along the crack. A intact aluminium D spar section was, iirc, approx 9” long from front to back, by 3” thick, with a hollow centre. The remaining intact metal was the “nose” of the aerofoil shape and was not much bigger than the length and width of my thumb. It was a fatigue crack, which had started at the back of the spar and rapidly grown. Flight time from the warning light first coming on was less than ten minutes.
Had we flown for any longer, two thirds of the length of that blade would have undoubtedly come off and I probably wouldn’t have been here to tell this story. did subsequently receive a sincere apology from my instructor, who not surprisingly was quite shocked by our lucky escape. I was quite pleased when the blades were upgraded to fibre composite ones.