The lottery is an interesting comparison, but its reverse thinking. The lottery win is a forced, desired outcome. It's engineered to be that way. If the powers that be wanted it not to happen, and push out the likelihood of an occurance to the point where such an outcome could be considered nebulus, then there would be more than 49 numbers! In the case of MGBs, I'm pretty sure that passengers and crew alike want a repeat to be statistically speaking, as near as dammit, impossible. If the bus brakes failed because of an inherent design flaw, I reckon they'd be modified, and all types subject to a recall. I guess aviation is so exacting (and emotionally charged) simply because of the stark consequences in the event of something like an MGB failure. HUMS was being introduced jsut as I was leaving the N Sea. Doubtless a useful piece of kit, but equally, it has been shown to be not too smart (or perhaps the interpretation of its data) in the case of REDL. I guess only time will tell. Having worked in RBI and CBM for a good number of years, I have to agree with the concept of "the less intrusive maintenance the better". Bitter experience in rotating equipment (turbines and the likes) has shown a significant number of failures post intrusive maintenance were actually tied back to errors in the maintenance itself. Every time we take a wrench or screwdriver to a piece of healthy machinary, we introduce a risk that we can leave it in a worse (or potentially worse) state than we found it.
JimL, you have clarified something for me, in that you state that the inspections were to provide assurance that there was no contamination within the MGBs, as opposed to the component parts of the gearboxes.....is that correct? That would certainly make the inspections a whole lot less onerous than every cog in every box. I had assumed that there was a concern over cracks that may have preceded the catastrophic failure. A wrong assumption on my part.
Last edited by bumpthump; 19th Apr 2009 at 19:38.