Tusker
As far as I know we have a proper MD hangar bearing instaled.
Blade banger
all current and past AD's are up to date on this machine and it has the 10300 hour tail boom
Mr Selfish
The bill will be a night mare but all bills for helicopters are
Thomas
Cruising at 1000 feet and between 80-90 knots, when a massive cracking rumbling noise was heard by all in the 500, the pedals froze instantly so we realised it was something in the tail rotor, we maintained our speed and entered autorotation.
we noticed we had only one viable place to go, along a road over the other side of the river. as we got closer we noticed many powerlines crossing right were we wanted to go and some large overhanging gum trees, so we changed heading and went for a large backyard of some house. all the time we kept our speed up around the 70 knot mark, if we slowed down we started to yaw. at the last second we had to pull pitch to slide in between some very large trees. on landing we ran on for as long as we could to stop the tailboom being cut off. it was a fast run on but very soft on the 500 and us.
The whole time as the engine was idling we could here the tailshaft banging around. the tail rotor push pull tube was bent at the moment of shear, that explaines the locked pedals.
Our engineer estimates that ten to twenty more seconds off flight the tail boom would have failed and the t tail and all the rest would have fallen off. not a nice thought.
what intriges us is that is sheared in a stabilized cruise not under load in a hover for example
any more thoughts would be greatly appreciated
Rotor1
