Pitchlink says:
Nick Lappos, I seem to recall that Scotia had an incident in the recent past regarding a tail rotor control failure in a 76C. Can't remember the exact details, I will have to look them up, but the aircraft landed safely at Lossiemouth without incident.
Nick sez:
I am not sure, but I think that was a pedal trim actuator/damper failure, which gave problems to the crew (did it tend to run away in one direction?) The crew handled it well, and all was fine, I believe. It did not require the techniques we are discussing here, I think, but I will defer to someone who is more familiar with the event.
Regarding Zimmerframe's point about simulators, I fully agree with you in their value. My only point is that sims are often only half right, and not particularly representative when improbable failures are being practiced. I do agree that as long as the training is reasonable preparation, they are quite valuable anyway.
Regarding the necessity for two crewmen in a given aircraft, the need to manipulate throttles in a very remotely probable event does not justify the second person, in my opinion. If this were true, we would be spending thousands of dollars a year "just in case" when that cash might be well spent preventing more common occurrences. If one looks at helicopter accident statistics, you can see what drives our game, and it is an eye opener. The mishaps are almost always operational in nature (about 2/3 to 3/4). By operational, I mean what are sometimes called "pilot error" (a term I use with great care) accidents. Without extending the thread way off base, I feel that much of what happens to cause accidents is related to the whole operational scenario, from training and equippage, to weather, procedures, displays and the like, usually (and perhaps improperly) all lumped into "pilot error".
I think we all need to work on fixing what actually happens to cause mishaps, and not sweat to much what might happen in the "extremely remote" probabilities, such as tail rotor failures.
I was the program manager on the joint Honeywell/Sikorsky/FAA program which certified the EGPWS system that is now available on the S-76. This might help reduce CFIT accidents to a memory, and this would cut about 30% of all helo accidents.
Here is a web site that has a great PDF file report on helo accidents offshore, based on 1400 aircraft, 1.4 million hours and 2 years. I believe the data is quite representative of helo operations anywhere, even military:
http://www.ogp.org.uk/pubs/300.pdf
Great stuff, and fodder for a bunch of comments from PPRUNERs.