To: Gomer Pylot
The 214ST is the ultimate UH1 stretch. From what I hear, it was never meant to be a commercial model, just a one-off in a few numbers for Iran, but more were built and sold before Bell discovered the error of its ways. I doubt they ever made any money from them in the long run, because of support costs.
I monitored the introduction of the 214 into service. They were designed and produced for the Imperial Iranian Army Aviation. They were rushed into production and were inadequately tested by both Bell and the US Army. As indicated in one of the previous posts they were a maintenance nightmare. In the month that I was involved in their introduction I calculated that there were over 70 Maintenance Man-Hours per flight hour. On one helicopter it took over four days to static balance a rotor system. We ended up swapping both blades and a rotorhead to get the rotor system in balance and even then we used more balances washers than allowed by the Maintenance manual to achieve balance.
The fuselages were poorly assembled and most of the blind cherry rivets lost the center pin resulting in opening the skins to get the pins and then we had to reinstall new rivets.
The rotorhead had no means of bleeding the static charge from the blades and as a result the magnetic field around the rotor system resulted in magnetizing the main mast which caused spark erosion on the internal gears and bearings. It also effected the standby compasses and the VOR system.
I issued my report outlining the problems including the 70+ MMH/FH and the director of product support changed the figure to 13-MMH/FH and Bell used this figure in their sales brochures resulting in several 214s being sold to oil companies. These 214s were pressed into service in Central and South America.
In service in Iran the 214s were mainly used to train Iranian pilots and as such only carried two or three students and a pilot. They were never operated at max gross weight nor did Bell test them at max gross weight. The oil companies did operate them at max gross weight and they had to replace the rotorheads at several hundred hours and the transmissions didn’t fair much better. They also had a lot of structural problems including loss of rivets.
The transmission was supported on a Noda Matic ™ suspension system, which permitted the transmission to move up and down in relation to the fixed engine. The short shaft moved in and out with the movement of the transmission and it turned into a grease pump. The grease that was extruded from the couplings plated out on the engine inlet bell. The grease attracted dirt and small debris and caused a disruption in the airflow into the engine resulting in compressor stalls. Each time a compressor stall was reported a full structural inspection was performed and in many instances major dynamic components were changed.
The overall build quality sucked.
The term DOG comes to mind.
