To: Flare Dammit!
You are a very difficult to convince. In the USA when a crash occurs the lawyers representing the survivors and next of kin will have their investigators determine if there was any foul play on the part of the manufacturer, the operator, the pilot(s) and if required the FAA. In respect to the manufacturer they will not only subpoena the design records they will also look at the Reliability, Maintainability and System Safety analysis. If the failure that caused the crash was not considered in the respective analyses the respective engineers can be held liable. Since I did all three analyses on the particular aircraft and I revealed the deficiencies to my superiors and they did nothing about it they can be held liable. When I released the information to the FAA and if they did nothing about it then they can be held liable. They did take action resulting in the two firings but for whatever reason they never mandated that any modification be performed. That is why I made the comment about making a lot of money as a technical witness at any trial that might come along.
Here is an example of how deep the lawyers go when they are investigating a crash. Several years ago a Boeing helicopter was lost over the North Sea due to a transmission lock up and a break in the phasing of the two rotors. A design mod was made in the transmissions to increase the reliability of the nuts that hold the planetary gears in place. The design was inadequately tested per the military spec that qualified the transmission and when the helicopter went into service the underside of the nuts began to salt water corrode finally breaking under stress. They brought the transmission chief engineer into the trial as well as several designers and they were sued along with Boeing.
Please do not make comments about lawyers.
Regarding the low life times of elements in the dynamic systems of I assume Bell helicopters it all stems from inadequate design, poor manufacturing processes and poor quality control. I have raised this on several other threads.
