Originally Posted by
Lonewolf_50
This makes it hard to swallow your argument with TommyL, - I can't find a rational way to counter his voiced concern until a) the root cause is identified/agreed and b) the root cause is addressed/resolved/mitigated.
The failure mode that led to this crash is the antithesis of graceful degradation: seems to me that everyone -- pilots, OEMs, passengers, maintenance/engineering, operations folks -- should be speaking with one voice. This needs to be figured out and not guessed at.
My argument with TommyL et al is that there shouldn't be a clamour to kill the EC225 whilst the facts remain unknown. I'll agree that this latest news is not good and if it transpires that there was a flaw in one of the planet gears that caused the catastrophe, and there were no prior warnings such as chips or VHM in the preceding days, and there was no obvious maintenance error either on the aircraft or at the gearbox maintenance facility (or a manufacturing error for that matter) then I will be in the queue to say that the 225 shouldn't fly again unless the issue can be robustly and fundamentally addressed. But so far we don't have the information to make that call. We don't know the epicyclic module's history, when and where it was last overhauled, seen the records from the overhaul, know whether there were any chip or VHM warnings. In fact so far we know very little and it is thus too early to condemn the 225.