Originally Posted by
arwom
AW139Engineer.
Noted your thoughts from the pilots perspective. What is your view from the Engineers eyes. Eg reliablity, ease of maintenance and Agusta technical and spares support etc
Ease of maintenance on the AW139 has been good so far, weaknesses are scissor bushings which last about 100-120 hours and they are rationed out by agusta, The titainium exhaust ducts are a problem right now and are prone to cracking, and in some cases I have heard from other operators of blow outs that set off the fire detection system. Changed ours at 300 hours.The Honeywell equipment failures so far has been a GCU, a COM, and 2 Rad Alts, you will require some laptop computer skills to work with the CMC, but so far it has been working very well for us. Very few phantom caution messages, none for quite a while. Have changed the input seal on
IGB at 100 hours, and at 300+ it looks like I may need to change it again.
Agusta parts are very slow, even when they say 2 days it could mean a week or two before you have that part in your hands. I highly recommend
the operator keeps spares on the shelf, or you will definity go AOG once and a while. One cannot rely on Agusta for Overnight Parts Availability here in North America. You are going to have to buy some over priced Agusta tooling also to maintain this aircraft. The pratt -67C engines are great and the customer support is very good, no issues with the engines so far.
