Aidan Karley wrote:

In article , Steve Firth
wrote:
And I suspect you get one of my relatives up front. If you are using
Bristows that is.

Them, CHC, whoever.

The relative in question had an engine failure just after lifting off
from a rig, he put it back down on the rig (safely). He faced
disciplinary action because the instructions are to ditch in the sea and
not clutter up the helipad with broken helicopters. Unsurprisingly all
the passengers were more than slightly grateful for his decision, since
the probability of survival in the sea was low.

Aidan Karley wrote:

A single AAIB report compiling statistics across multiple accidents
over multiple years? I don't have one ; never heard of one ; if they did
one, you can bet that it'd be suppressed for containing "commercially
sensitive" information.

You may recall that a few years ago Bristows discovered that almost
every rotor head in their store was forged, and not in the good sense of
"made in a forge".

In article , Steve Firth
wrote:
He faced
disciplinary action because the instructions are to ditch in the sea and
not clutter up the helipad with broken helicopters.

Rough.
Having faced dropping into the sea, I can well understand why he
landed back on the helideck, but the "ditch-don't-land-again" rule is for
a good reason (BTW, I wouldn't be sure whether it's a "rule" or a
"recommendation" ; and considering the degree of autonomy that a pilot
has, I'm surprised that it went to disciplinary action. But, strange
things happen when there are multi-million-quid machines and insurance
companies involved).
One rough landing I had illustrates it nicely : one of the engines
flamed-out when we were just coming into land, leaving the pilots with
insufficient power to maintain a hover let alone decelerate from the
descent. So, the pilots had the choice between trying to hard-land into
the helideck at slow car-crash speeds, or to roll and yaw so that they
missed the helideck and ditched. According to the helideck crew, the main
rotors came within under a metre of hitting the helideck. During the
90-odd ft of fall towards the sea, the pilots managed to re-start the lost
engine, and pulled out of the dive with 10~20ft spare before we ditched.
After a 20 minute hover to check that the engines were stable, the pilots
brought us in to land safely. We disembarked, the returning crew boarded
(I think - I was a bit rattled and I simply can't remember if they flew
the chopper back empty and brought out a replacement chopper. The
colleague I was relieving refers to it as my "****ty flight suit moment",
but I didn't actually **** myself. Definitely a
"oh-****-oh-****-oh-****-this-time-I'm-REALLY-going-to-die" moment
though.)
If the pilots had tried to do a controlled crash onto the helideck,
then they would almost certainly have destroyed the landing gear, and then
lost attitude control. At that point, the rotors would likely have
contacted either helideck or the structure of the radio-room/ top deck
accommodation and the machine would have started to disintegrate. How far
disintegration would have proceeded is of course, highly variable. On that
particular rig (the Noble Julie Robertson,
http://www.rigzone.com/data/rig_detail.asp?rig_id=519 ), there are 4
floors to the accommodation, and at that time there was nothing to prevent
burning fuel from cascading down through the ripped-up helideck and down
into at least one floor of the accommodation. That's in the order of 30
off-shift people sleeping in the line-of-fire, as well as (at least) the 5
man helideck crew and a helicopter's-worth of passengers waiting to go
home. Plus the cost of repairing the helideck. And the "interesting times"
of trying to evacuate the injured using single-lift stretchers from the
main deck instead of landing the next chopper onto the helideck. Say,
30-odd people in the line-of-fire versus 19 (maximum, 17 PAX + 2 crew)
who're awake, alert and totally buzzing on adrenaline, in water-proof and
flame-resistant clothing. Not a terribly hard calculation.

I actually got run-off that rig by the Talisman company man, for
the heinous crime of making copies of the HSE's guidance about "Minimum
Acceptable Standards for Accommodation" and distributing them to the crew
; unsurprisingly, the NJR didn't meet most of the requirements, and so
simply should not have been allowed to enter UK waters until it had been
brought into line (i.e. 2-man cabins instead of 6- or 8-man ones ;
en-suite showers instead of communal ones ; better sound-proofing). While
I'm not by any means a Shell fan-boy, the fact that they ****ed the NJR
off from a 6-month floatel contract after 6 weeks says what they thought
of it. Anyway, I'm glad to hear that the company man who ran me off has
himself been ****ed-off for having a "unacceptable attitude".
All-in-all, a rather eventful 5-day job. Which like so many 5-day
jobs, took well over 3 weeks.

(It's possible that the NJR has been upgraded since, but I wouldn't
bet on it.)
--
Aidan
Aberdeen, Scotland
Written at Sun, 02 Sep 2007 14:05 +0100, but posted later.

In article , Steve Firth
wrote:
You may recall that a few years ago Bristows discovered that almost
every rotor head in their store was forged, and not in the good sense of
"made in a forge".

I heard that there had been forged ones found (as a result of
auditing after the Norfolk crash IIRC), but I'm not so sure about "almost
every".
--
Aidan
Aberdeen, Scotland
Written at Sun, 02 Sep 2007 14:52 +0100, but posted later.

Aidan Karley wrote:

In article , Steve Firth
wrote:
You may recall that a few years ago Bristows discovered that almost
every rotor head in their store was forged, and not in the good sense of
"made in a forge".

I heard that there had been forged ones found (as a result of
auditing after the Norfolk crash IIRC), but I'm not so sure about "almost
every".

They ran an audit, and condemned every one in the store.

One rough landing I had illustrates it nicely : one of the engines
flamed-out when we were just coming into land, leaving the pilots with
insufficient power to maintain a hover let alone decelerate from the
descent.

Pardon me sounding curious and perhaps not that knowledgeable re rotary
wing, but this the one remaining engine not having sufficient power to
hover even and effectively being useless in this instance, why do they
have twins if you can't do that then or is it the one engine can make
the descent tolerable but isn't that what auto rotation is for?...
--
Tony Sayer

In article , Tony sayer wrote:
Pardon me sounding curious and perhaps not that knowledgeable re rotary
wing,

Well, I'm not a pilot either, I'm just going on what the pilots
were saying as they queued with us for the ****ter beside the helideck
afterwards.
I guess that the engines weren't at full throttle (either of them)
and when one was lost while decelerating towards a hover, they couldn't
throttle up the remaining one fast enough to replace the lost lift. Of
course, you can always trade the rotational energy in the rotor for some
lift by increasing the angle of attack of the rotors (I recall "dropping
the collective" being a phrase used) but that only works so far before
you reduce the rotor speed to it's stall speed. Then again, since the tip
has a higher air speed on one side of the flight vector, then you'll
stall and lose lift on one side, rolling you.
Complex things, paraffin budgies. I was trying to organise a blast
on one of Bristows *real* simulators for a friend's stag night earlier
this year. The phrase "not a hope in hell, sorry mate" sprang easily to
the Bristows mannie's lips.

why do they
have twins if you can't do that then or is it the one engine can make
the descent tolerable but isn't that what auto rotation is for?

Autogyring isn't to make the descent tolerable, it's to make the
crash into a "good landing" (on the 'can you walk away?' criterion). Of
course, we don't get the option of walking (mostly, see later), but given
the choice between getting the doors open and the liferafts properly
deployed as opposed to doing the full
punch-the-windows-out-while-hanging-upside-down-in-your-harness-with-5-ce
ntigrade-salt-water-running-up-your-nostrils-and-every-nerve-screaming-th
is-time-you're-really-going-to-die-you-stupid-****er-why-don't-you-get-a-
proper-job-like-you've-promised-to-for-years palaver ... well, I'd really
like to slow down the landing enough that we've a chance to swim away.
BTW, I believe that there's at least one airframe that's been
fished out of the North Sea, stripped down and returned to flight. Makes
me look at the tin-worm on my mate's cars and wonder ...

Concerning the option of walking home : snoozing away on a flight
out ; go over the coastline at sunrise ; Zzzzz ; something in the cabin
noises changes ; everyone is awake from their hung-over slumbers thinking
"Uh Oh" ; watch the sun patches start to move from the left wall of the
cabin, round the front, and stabilize on the right wall ; so ... we've
just done a 180degree turn ; then we descend into the cloud ; everyone is
tightening up their belts and pulling on the neoprene diving hoods ;
descended to cruise at about 200ft and heading back the way we came ; we
get to the shore line, along those long beaches from Newmachar down to
BoD ... and the pilots cruise back in parallelling the surf line about
100m out from the beach, so we'd just about had the choice of walking
back. Only THEN do the pilots remember to tell us that there was a
problem, like we hadn't guessed already. Made less than half-speed coming
back in ; had a 3-hour wait until another bird came available to fly us
out. Then straight onto a shift-change schedule to go onto nights.
Lovely.

--
Aidan
Aberdeen, Scotland
Written at Mon, 03 Sep 2007 22:56 +0100, but posted later.

In article , Steve Firth wrote:
I heard that there had been forged ones found (as a result of
auditing after the Norfolk crash IIRC), but I'm not so sure about "almost
every".

They ran an audit, and condemned every one in the store.

Hmm, I think I want to talk to BALPA. Sharpish.

--
Aidan
Aberdeen, Scotland
Written at Mon, 03 Sep 2007 23:23 +0100, but posted later.

Aidan Karley wrote:

In article , Steve Firth wrote:
I heard that there had been forged ones found (as a result of
auditing after the Norfolk crash IIRC), but I'm not so sure about "almost
every".

They ran an audit, and condemned every one in the store.

Hmm, I think I want to talk to BALPA. Sharpish.

Finding the evidence is the bugger. The story whipped around the places
I was working at the time but no one with a direct link to the stores
was commenting. One rumour was that they had taken in a stores during a
takeover of another company and that company hadn't been too careful in
where it bought parts.

I don't know what was forged about the parts, probably the parts were
either crash recovered or were mis-described in some way. It doesn't
seem worth a counterfeiter's time setting up production of complex
parts, and it's more likely that it was the documentation that was
forged in order to put back dodgy (but OEM) parts into circulation. Once
suspicion has been cast on the certification, it's possibly wise to
scrap everything from the same source.

The US is better at documenting such things:

http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/cac/news/pr2005/159.html

Concerning the option of walking home : snoozing away on a flight
out ; go over the coastline at sunrise ; Zzzzz ; something in the cabin
noises changes ; everyone is awake from their hung-over slumbers thinking
"Uh Oh" ; watch the sun patches start to move from the left wall of the
cabin, round the front, and stabilize on the right wall ; so ... we've
just done a 180degree turn ; then we descend into the cloud ; everyone is
tightening up their belts and pulling on the neoprene diving hoods ;
descended to cruise at about 200ft and heading back the way we came ; we
get to the shore line, along those long beaches from Newmachar down to
BoD ... and the pilots cruise back in parallelling the surf line about
100m out from the beach, so we'd just about had the choice of walking
back. Only THEN do the pilots remember to tell us that there was a
problem, like we hadn't guessed already. Made less than half-speed coming
back in ; had a 3-hour wait until another bird came available to fly us
out. Then straight onto a shift-change schedule to go onto nights.
Lovely.


Thanks for your rather "interesting" reply)
--
Tony Sayer

In article , Steve Firth
wrote:
They ran an audit, and condemned every one in the store.

Hmm, I think I want to talk to BALPA. Sharpish.

Finding the evidence is the bugger.

I'm sure.

One rumour was that they had taken in a stores during a
takeover of another company and that company hadn't been too careful in
where it bought parts.

Hmmm. Not many companies out there running large fleets of Super
Pumas with a small scattering of S61s, Chinooks and Dauphins. Can't say
as I've kept enough notice of the chopper business to say who's been
eating who. Actually, it's more complex than that, because there are
several variants of the Super Puma in service (AIUI) with different
shapes of rotor tip, and I'd bet that they're not interchangeable.
It doesn't
seem worth a counterfeiter's time setting up production of complex
parts, and it's more likely that it was the documentation that was
forged in order to put back dodgy (but OEM) parts into circulation.

They set up production of an imitation of complex parts, with no
QC and no research costs, in whatever materials they have to hand, then
sell them into a supply chain where the only people able to see a
difference between the original and counterfeit part are the fitters who
have to try to fit them. Plenty of room there to make a profit.

Once
suspicion has been cast on the certification, it's possibly wise to
scrap everything from the same source.

I've heard *LOTS* about dodgy aircraft maintenance in other parts
of the world. I've heard lots about the poisonous wildlife and lightning,
too, so I get my jabs, take my malaria prophylaxis (memo to self : update
the emergency stock in the fridge), and keep a weather eye on the
weather. Some companies in the business refuse to allow their "staff" to
fly with Russian airlines, but that doesn't really help when the only
alternative to flying is a full day on the roads (which aren't that safe
themselves - little different to UK roads).
Come to think of it, I've heard of plenty of counterfeit parts in
the UK car and coach and truck maintenance supply lines too, and that's
not counting the genuine "aftermarket" parts.

--
Aidan
Aberdeen, Scotland
Written at Tue, 04 Sep 2007 07:48 +0100, but posted later.