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Old 6th Oct 2017, 18:20
  #126 (permalink)  
casper64
 
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: N/A
Age: 47
Posts: 150
Received 27 Likes on 11 Posts
It depends how you interpret the video...
THE cause of the crash was the minor spalling on the inside of the ring gear, this seems 100% certain. Now the question is: how did this spalling happen??? For this they made this huge fault tree analysis and came up with the following possible causes:
A: by intrusion of small particles
B: by shockload
C: by pressure of the roller bearings
D: by fatigue
E: a possible combination of the above.
To counter this they;
A: Reduced the risk of particles entering the gearbox by the additional covers and to perform the work only in certified maintenance centers.
B: To counter effect of shock loads they installed monitor sensors on transport cases, remove gearboxes with "incidents" from the fleet and have maintenance done in certified maintenance centers.
C: To counter the effect of the pressure of the rolling bearings they have removed the version with the generally higher pressure from the fleet, reduced lifetime of MGB.
D: To counter the effect of fatigue they have reduced lifetime on MGB, reduced stress with only allowing the better bearings.
E: To counter the risk of undetected spalling they raised inspection intervals and installed better chip detectors.

Now with all those measures in place I think they covered all most likely causes of the accident. Is it a 100% guarantee??? No, but we will never have a 100% certainty with mechanical things flying through the air... If you additionally add up the fact that these gearboxes also have 100 of thousands if not millions of hours of flighttime I think it is currently even safer than when putting in a brand new gearbox design as some have suggested. I would get on one without hesitation.
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