To: YouWillSee
I lifted this from another thread in Rotorheads. This will explain what goes on in Aircraft manufacturing companies. It deals with the EH-101 and if you want more I can search other threads in which I pointed out major design deficiencies on the A-310 and A-300-600 and nobody took action including Airbus and three other companies in the Airbus Consortium. When I reported it to the FAA they took action and the VP and Program Manager in the firm I worked at were fired, but the design was never changed.
To:
Thomas Coupling,
What the Royal Navy bought was a potential for disaster in the EH-101. When the EH-101 was in the design stages I worked as a consultant at Agusta and In my position I worked very closely with Westland. Each company developed a means of compiling a FMEA (Failure Mode Effects Analysis)data base but in the three years I was there they had not developed a means to get the two systems to talk to each other. My position entailed the instruction and supervision of the Italian engineers in the development of the FMEAs. I also had systems responsibilities as well and I too constructed FMEAs. I stressed that they should consider the potential for single point failures that would be catastrophic and down the helicopter. We were about three quarters through the task and the Italian manager had them remove the catastrophic failures from the FMEAs as it was his feeling that there would be no catastrophic failures. I pointed out strongly that the EH-101 was similar in design to the SH3-D/S-61 which Agusta was building and they had suffered catastrophic failures and in some cases, had crashed and burned. Sorry to say, I was overruled. To date, there have been two single point failures that caused loss of life. Both failures had been noted on the original FMEAs.
Another sad point was that the engineering department and the product support department did not talk to each other. This adversarial relationship began in the early days when Agusta was designing the A-109. The respective managers of the engineering and product support had very bad feelings toward each other. Now fast forward to the then present time. Each department had three changes in management and the war was still going on. In my last six months on contract I was assigned by the Director of Agusta to find a means of getting the two departments together. This was imperitive as the product support department needed engineering input to make the manuals. Another point, The product support department because of the isolation from the engineering department and their IBM main frame computer bought an NCR computer that could not talk to the IBM so they (Product Support) had no access to the FMEAs which would be used to construct the troubleshooting instructions in the maintenance manuals. I busted my hump setting up meetings between the two managers, the director and myself.
A lot of good things were said in the meetings but when I left at the end of my contract they were still not talking. The system of communication that was eventually set up was written requests for information sent to engineering. These requests did not go directly from the questionor to the questionee, they went through a filter in the systems engineering department. These two guys would determine if the question was valid or not and if they felt it was not valid it never got to the questionee. The questionor was not told of the rejection and he sat on his butt waiting for an answer.
While all of this was going on, Westland was laying off a major part of their R&M department.
The EH-101 is in certification right now and the FMEAs are crucial in the construction of the safety hazards analysis which is required to gain certification. If the FMEAs don't have catastrophic failures then they will not be accounted for in the safety hazards analysis and another unsafe helicopter will be certificated. Does this ring a bell in the minds of the readers?
As they say, you get what you pay for.
If you want more on this subject go to the EH-101 Crash thread here on Rotorheads.
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The Cat
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The Cat