First of all I would lie to send my condolences to the passengers that lost their lives and associated loved ones...its a very sad day.
My comments below are not in any way related to today's incident as we need to let qualified personnel get on with their subsequent investigation.
With regards to all the HUMS comments and looking at options to alert crew during flight as well as inform engineering prior to failure etc.We need to understand the philosophy of HUMS and whether it should be included in the cockpit.
HUMS essentially is measuring/monitoring the 'health' of a component. Every rotating shaft, gear and bearing produce a harmonic signature and these harmonic signatures are recorded/collected during each flight. Over the decades Smiths Industries-bought out by GE, gathered large volumes of this data to then produce 'thresholds' so that if the harmonic reading for a particular component exceeded this threshold then a message is generated to inform the engineer after downloading the data. It is important to mention that the automatic acquisition of this data can be taking during straight/level cruise...during a gust of wind...or during a turn, and so a harmonic that exceeded a threshold on one flight may be normal on the next flight. This is why its important for the engineer to assess via trending over a period of time or a 'step change' in data that may be related to a maintenance event for example.
In some cases like with AW, you can subscribe to online support where the data downloaded after each flight is washed through a remote AW HUMS database to then produce a report which is sent online back to the operator.
In essence HUMS moves maintenance away from reactive based maintenance to pro-active maintenance. So in the end the HUMS software is designed to maintain the 'health' of a harmonic signature...not the imminent failure of the component.
Now I put the question out there-do pilots want to be notified during flight of varying levels of 'health' of harmonic signatures of 20...30...40 accelerometers? Would this not be a disruptive impact of the cockpit environment?
I would like to think (as others have suggested) that it may evolve to be more like fixed wing where high priority data will be sent to a ground station in real time where qualified maintenance personnel are monitoring.
Just my 2 cents worth
SS