Shame the quality is not there!!
The S-92 involved in Tuesday’s flight turnaround is operated by Bristow Norway. The aircraft was reportedly on its way to the offshore rig Maersk Reacher with 17 people on board when, according Jackson, “a high speed shaft coupling failed,” causing automatic protective features to kick in.
One of the helicopter’s engines shut down, as designed. The aircraft is certified to operate on one engine and was able to return to base safely.
FARdude - welcome to PPrune and great introductory first post.
Any helicopter can suffer a high speed drive shaft failure. Many of those that have previously, have been so catastrophic that the occupants were not lucky enough to continue to land to make an uneventful single engine landing. I personally have known several people who have perished in this way in various types. Unfortunately none of these had an automatic overspeed protection system which shut the engine down safely in a split second as soon as a breakage had been sensed. The human reaction to this would be far slower and is very often far too slow to prevent the awful consequences.
I strongly suggest you wait and see exactly what the cause was before claiming quality issues. I very strongly suspect (with good reason) that the cause is not purely related to the design.
I do not quite understand your "head-butting smiley" sentiment. To my mind this is a very good endorsement of the design in that the protective systems did exactly what they should have done and made a potentially very serious, catastrophic event, into a rather undramatic engine shutdown and safe return to base. As an S92 pilot this gives me more confidence and reassures me that the overspeed protection system is a very good and robust one. The system sensed the breakage as opposed to a simple overspeed, as Np exceeded Nr and shutdown the engine before it was able to explode and destroy other components.