.......Of course, however in this case it (CBM) is being used to increase component lives in order to decrease costs, not to improve safety. In fact reducing safety margins.....
HeliComparator- You are correct about why CBM was adopted. It allowed components like bearings & gears to remain in service until they gave an indication of the onset of failure, which saves O&M costs. Gears and bearings are designed with very conservative fatigue margins, and in fact current industry practice is to design gears for
unlimited fatigue life in tooth bending at 100% torque.
Quite often, due to the statistical nature of fatigue life calculations, gears and bearings may also last 2 or 3 times their predicted fatigue life for surface durability. Gear and bearing surface fatigue failures tend to be fairly benign in nature and are easy to detect with magnetic chip detectors long before they become a serious problem. With regards to false indications, the early types of magnetic chip detectors tended to produce false indications quite often due to nuisance debris in the lubricant. But the new generation of chip detectors have fuzz suppression circuitry and are much more reliable.