To: Helmet Fire
Early on in my association with PPRuNe I got into some very hairy arguments with a British Army Pilot regarding POF. He used terms that I was unfamiliar with such as flapping to equality and several others. I could not understand why he was so hostile towards me when I mentioned such things as gyroscopic precession and retreating blade stall and how it and several other phenomena that effected disc position were related to gyroscopic precession. This went on for several weeks and there was no convincing him and I certainly wasn’t bending in his direction either. It wasn’t that I was speaking in American English and he was speaking in British English. It was that we were speaking in two different technical languages. We were both describing similar phenomena but the terminology we were using was alien to the other guy. You and the others have often accused me of intransigence in not being able to accept your explanations as being the truth and my explanations as being false or wrong. If you go back to many of my posts you will see that I have accepted the various explanations as being an alternate to the theory I was professing. As much as RW-1 may criticize this alternate theory as being a bunch of crap and that I am unwilling to accept the word of as he refers to all of you as being experts and as such to admit I was wrong. If you go back to the various postings countering my theory of POF you will see that there is no common ground between all of my detractors. This doesn’t make you wrong or me right or to the contrary you being right and me being wrong.
Put a Mullah, a Rabbi, a Priest and a Protestant minister in the same room and each in his own way will describe God to the point that the other clergyman will say that the other guy is wrong. What they fail to understand that there is only one God and each man will see him / her in his own way. In the case of POF there are many ways of teaching it and although the philosophies are different the helicopter continues to fly. If it works for you then go with it but don’t tell the other guy that he is wrong because you chose to disagree with him.
Regarding HUMS I became familiar with the concept as it was built into the dynamic systems of the EH-101. The only problem I can see with it is that the vibratory temperature limits and acoustic parameters that are programmed into it are developed under controlled conditions. This black box is then installed into a helicopter that may have several thousand operating hours. If the programming does not cater to the older helicopter that may be perfectly good but it is operating at higher temps, higher vibratory levels and generating acoustic patterns that are close to the allowable limit for a new helicopter but still be perfectly acceptable for a helicopter with high hours and my assumptions are correct the HUMS system will result in a high pull rate of dynamics components that are still serviceable. But then again, what do I know?