Yes. Design Verification.
ha yes but acceptance testing is supposed to be none destructive.
Joking might be excused under the banner of gallows humour in this particular instance given all are well, although in no small thanks to the pilots.
Fair play to the CAA but actually I'm not sure the terrain - hostile or not - cares too much when the gearbox internals are sh1tting themselves.
This is going to end up as a Harvard business school case study. Eurocopter have winged it since May in a vein attempt to avoid what is now the almost certain fact that they will need to say that a design, material, manufacturing (or combination) has caused issues. The failure of the Emergency lubrication system is a sideshow.
Beyond that the failure of the MGB in the 2009 crash of G-REDL suggests a more worrying attitude. In the case of REDL it was suggested in the AAIB report that the planet gear was lifed to 6600hrs in the AS332, 4400hrs in the EC225. I think I'm right in saying that the failure occured at around 3800hrs but then the manufacturer seeming to want to rely heavily on HUMS which whilst mandated what are the thresholds of the condition indicators before the operator is well over the line?
Two things seem to hold true. The manufacturer in the event of a failure seems to rely very heavily on the HUMS and whilst they don't suggest it is the primary method of detecting gearbox degradation thats exactly how it seems to be spun when a EC225 ends in the sea.
Beyond that as has already been said before an alarm is fine but without strict guidelines of what exactly means "no go" I'm not sure the alarm was anymore help in the case of REDL.