Originally Posted by
Mitchaa
It's my understanding HUMS picked up on the EC225 bevel failure in advance but due to the once per day download pattern used by the operator at that time, it went out on its afternoon flight and subsequently failed resulting in the ditch. Had the HUMS card been downloaded after its morning flight and before its afternoon flight, the impending failure was clear and would have been caught, the aircraft would never have departed. That's why the industry changed to more frequent after flight HUMS downloads in the aftermath.
If it's a gearbox failure this time around which to be honest, is more probable than probably not, I would expect the HUMS to come under close scrutiny. The difficulty the operators have is deciphering the data and what it actually means to the airworthiness of the helicopter, there are a lot of instrumentation defects for example so these need to be filtered out and it can be difficult to detect genuine mechanical failure modes. HUMS probably catches a lot that we are all unaware of because they get to it in time, it's only when failures happen, HUMS comes under scrutiny.
Agreed, so my point is why is the data not taken seriously enough? The manufacturers should be forced to produce a more user friendly interface for the technicians to be able to interrogate between flights. And the operators should be forced by the authorities to read HUMS between flights. The information is there to make flights safer but we are failing to use it to its full potential. I operate in Norway and am pretty sure the HUMS data is downloaded but couldn't possibly be properly interrogated in the short time between flights. In my opinion HUMS data should be looked at very closely after a MGB caution of any sort. Does it happen now? Doubt it....