AW139 Ice Protection system.
For Oden:
The Ice protection on the 139 is certified to protect for known icing condition up to 10 000ft.Flight in freezing rain or freezing drizzle in not approved.The system weight about 200 kg and is certified FAR 29 and JAR 29.There is 2 AC GEN added to the main transmission,one 45 KVA and one 25 KVA. AC power provides heating for the main rotor blades,tail rotor blades, the windshield and the ice detector heads.The tail rotor deicing is ON all time when the system is ON,the main rotor blades have 6 different zones,3 critical and 3 non-critical,the heat goes ON by cycle,one zone at the time,to remove the ice.
It never worked on any of our aircraft.We had a tail rotor slip ring failure who could have been catastrophic.The slip ring transmit the power to the tail rotor blades, there is fix part on the tail rotor gearbox and one moving part attached to the blades.The attachment on the fix part broke and the all piece started to spin around......every aircraft had damage on this system and they were removed in order to figure out what to do next.Apparently Agusta came with a modification to fix the problem....Will see.....So,we are in Winter and we are not able to use it(which is good for me...)