On another thread, John Eacott posted the following:
On a serious side, there have been a lot of bucket drops this season, most of them equipment failures, rather than pilot error. We always fly with the cargo master Off, but have had two uncommanded releases earlier this season, which we tracked down to an inherent hook fault, when NSW NPWS BK also had two identical uncommanded releases.
I recall that there were several last on last year's fires as well. Is this a BK117 issue, or do you think it is more common?
As our civil aviation authority, nor our transport safety board choose to publish a "crash comic" such as the Canadian "Vortex", we are left to learn lessons from overseas incidents and we have no means of identifying and rectifying trends.
Internationally, and Oz-wise, I am wondering how common the bucket drop really is.
