The 101 has a nasty habit of catastrophic failures and the RFM contains a note within Section 8 Emergency Procedures for the BK117 that warns to shutdown the engine immediately if a loss or flucuation of N2 indication occurs. Nice question arises....what if there is no Engine Chip Light illuminated but you do get the flucuation and then a loss of N2 indication....do you now shut down the engine or must you wait for the Engine Chip Light to illuminate? The 101 has come a long way from its inception...I can still remember the almost continous Hot End inspections we had to do. Now we seem to be going from overhaul to overhaul on our two aircraft.

Scattercat....did you get an engine chip warning prior to failure 80nm offshore?

SASless
Yes we did get a chiplight about 60 sec's prior ... however to be honest (and a lesson learned!) we were fooled into thinking it was another spurious indication. We were still planning / thinking OEI "just in case" it was for real when it convinced us in no uncertain terms. I treat em' ALL seriously now.

Scattercat...

How about other indications...gauge fluctuations...noises...smell of hot oil during previous afterflight inspections...vibrations...??

SASless,

As far as I am aware, there were no engine chip warning system in the cockpit the aircraft that went in the UK - that was my point, it was becuase of that incident that a warning system was installed in the cockpit.

I would agree - blindly following the EOPs is not good, but the first phase of an emergency is diagnosis and confirm indications. Then you can act accordingly, using the appropriate page of the EOPs.

SASless
Nothing ... just the chiplight. As mentioned, we had had about a week of false indications with the plug pulled & checked each time, with nothing on it.