JohnDixson
Secondly, these posts do not address the central question of why the crew did not follow the published emergency procedure, which would have afforded the opportunity to use the floats as designed.
John, the matter of the crew's reaction to the emergency is discussed
ad infinitum in the other thread about the accident. Here, we are talking about the S-92 from design to operations.
The fact is, helicopters sometimes crash. From the very beginning, Sikorsky touted the S-92 as the (if you'll permit a little sarcasm on my part) safest helicopter designed and built, past, present or future. The reality is that while it has some nifty technological advances that SAC is calling "safety features," those items may or may not make the aircraft
actually safer.
Regardless of the particulars of the Cougar crash, Sikorsky is going to have a hard time justifying to a jury how their transmission actually meets the requirements of 29.297(c)(1). Some (like me) would say that it does not. But who knows? The court (or NTSB, or whomever) may find that Sikorsky's assumptions about the trans were perfectly logical and reasonable. That would shut me up right quick.
It's ironic...tragically so...that if Sikorsky had only installed a transmission oil quantity gauge from the get-go, the Cougar accident
may have been avoided. If a crew sees the pressure at zero and the quantity at zero, they know they're in deep sh*t. There would be no question but to put the dang thing down.
But the Cougar pilots didn't have full information. All they had was a zero
pressure reading, and the knowledge that other S-92's had suffered some kinds of oil pump failures. As we all know and admit, the zero pressure reading
should have been enough for them to decide to put 'er down. But they did not. Being humans and not robots, the two of them came to a decision and made a mistake. We can be sure they knew what the RFM called for. We cannot be sure exactly why they disregarded it.
As a pilot, I'm certain that they did not think for one second that all of their transmission oil had departed the aircraft. Heck, wasn't that what the EBS was for?
Finally, it seems astonishing to me that SAC has not yet retrofitted a transmission oil quantity gauge to the S-92. How hard could it be? That's all it would take to eliminate another accident of this type. Put a quantity gauge in, and then in the RFM put in big letters: ZERO PRESSURE AND ZERO QUANTITY, LAND NOW OR DIE!!!!!! (The number of exclamation points they actually use is optional.) Then again, there are probably combinations of pilots and circumstance that would result in even that warning being disregarded.