To: Weight and Balance
The FMEA was written against the design that had already been cast in concrete and not the system being designed because of a failure predicted in the FMEA.
Regarding Westland having any knowledge of this specific FMEA I would doubt seriously if they had a clue about this FMEA or for that matter any FMEAs that were written by Agusta. The FMEAs written by both Agusta and Westland were supposed to interface with each other with this being done using some type of a computer conversion program. Agusta and Westland used different computer systems that could not talk to each other and consequently Westland and Agusta had no knowledge of the FMEAs being written by the other company. At some point paper copies may have been transferred from one firm to another but to my knowledge, the conversion program that allowed the computers to talk to each other was never developed. Another point that must be understood is that the two companies each had specific design responsibilities and FMEAs represented the elements that were being designed by each company. The manager of the Agusta R&M department in a pique of anger decided to remove all of the catastrophic failures from the FMEAs and I can only assume that Westland did not follow suit. The failures that caused the crashes of the EH-101 were originally predicted in the original FMEAs but they were removed as indicated above.
[ 15 February 2002: Message edited by: Lu Zuckerman ]</p>