Interesting article.
Can anyone explain this?:
On Oct. 8, 2008, the company issued an advisory calling for "enhanced inspections" of the oil filter bowl studs and threads, and on Nov. 5 made changes to the maintenance manual
Paul Jackson, a spokesman for Sikorsky, said the changes "would have allowed customers to detect discrepancies in the stud threads and thus prevent a fatigue fracture of the stud."
AFAIK the MM change simply banned reusing the nuts.
Nice to see ex TC officials understand the problem of the indaequate certification (even if Broome was not a crash):
Alan Stewart, a former Transport Canada employee who oversaw the Canadian certification of the S-92, said after the Australian crash, the assumptions of the original certification for "30-minute run dry" were no longer valid.
"The whole premise that the (main gearbox) case could not break and leak out every drop of oil had been proven wrong before the Newfoundland crash. That's the point where the certification assumptions were proven wrong," said Stewart, who now works in the private sector.
and
Shawn Coyle, a former employee of Transport Canada's air worthiness division, contends regulators should have quickly ordered repairs and given clear instructions to pilots.
"It should have been weeks, at the most," he said.
Coyle, a 60-year-old test pilot, also said Transport Canada's certification system needs to improve the way it reacts to key assumptions used in certification if a failure is exposed.
Its clear Sikorsky have failed to communicate clearly, based on the experience of the TSB man who arrange the lab tests on the Broome studs:
"I still question what Sikorsky and the FAA knew (about) how close that transmission was to failure. ... That was what I was hoping to hear when I sent the email saying, 'We look forward to hearing what you find because we have these aircraft operating in Canada,' " he said in a recent telephone interview from his office in Vancouver.
"And I still haven't heard."
Of more explosive note is that the FAA claims that after Broome its:
...response was appropriate after the incident in Broome, Australia, because it, "prompted discussions among many FAA specialists about the relationship of the Broome failure to the certification basis of the aircraft."
Does his mean the FAA, while failing to issue an AD before Cougar 491, had to have a debate over wether the aircraft actual meets it certification basis?