Hey guys, this is not defaming a good helicopter, it is pointing out that safety rules change with time, and if you buy an old design made recently, you get old safety rules.
How can you tell? The Type Certificate Data Sheet tells you, no matter when the aircraft was built, how old its design rules are.
tecpilot and Giovanni, here is a link to the TCDS for the 117 C2, which is a grandfathered BK-117. It shows that the rules the 117 C2/EC 145 meets are not particularly new, and many are original to the original 117:
http://webpages.charter.net/nlappos/H13EU.pdf
I really love it when someone like Giovanni drops back to 8 years old and says something like, "Well, so's your father!!"
In fact the S-76 family is grandfathered, also. If you don't accept that
new aircraft designs are safer than old aircraft designs, too bad, there is always Santa Clause, too.
I must point out that internal Sikorsky basic crash design requirements are tougher than FAR, and match US military requirements for all its models in production. An S-76 can have this kind of strike and not damage its structure, it was proven quite a few years back when one was landed into a rig catwalk, where it struck the steel structure with all main blades at full power (the pilot was trying to escape) and the
sealant around the main transmission was not even broken, the transmission was removed by simply removing the bolts.