Helicopters - The accident last year is a duplicate........

...... of an accident offshore Scotland in 2009. What

actions did Eurocopter take at that time? Today, the EC225

and AS332L2 are unsafe. (Ed.)

Airbus Vows to Raise Safety Bar,

Leverage Digital Systems

By James T. McKenna | February 7, 2017

Offshore

 
 
 
 
 

Airbus H225 Super Puma. Photo courtesy of Airbus Helicopters

The fatal April 2016 crash of a Super Puma in Norway has left Airbus Helicopters committed to raising the safety bar for itself and the rotorcraft industry, in part by making greater use of digital data from flight operations, the company’s CEO said.

The accident came “as a shock for all the industry, for Airbus, for me and increased my resolve – as well as the company’s – to collectively raise the bar in safety for us, for the industry,” CEO Guillaume Faury told R&WI. “We see digital enabling new safety standards.”

On April 29, 2016, the CHC Helikopter Service 
EC225LP crashed on approach to Bergen, Norway, after its main rotor separated from the aircraft on a return flight from a North Sea rig. The crash killed all 11 passengers and the two pilots on board. A probe led by the Accident Investigation Board of Norway is months away from concluding. But investigators have said the most likely cause of the main rotor separation was fatigue cracking that caused a second-stage planet gear to disintegrate and rip the main gearbox apart.

The accident led to the worldwide grounding of EC225LPs and AS332L2s in the Super Puma family in June. The European Aviation Safety Authority left the grounding last October, and the FAA followed suit shortly thereafter. But the civil aviation authorities in the U.K. and Norway have left the grounding orders in place. Airbus is working with those authorities “to restore the confidence in the products and ensure a smooth and full return to service when the time comes in the North Sea,” Faury said.

“Since the accident, we are reviewing many, many things directly linked to the accident or indirectly linked,” he added. “We are reviewing the way we work and the way the industry is working as well, because unfortunately it’s not the single accident that took place in 2016. As you know, the industry has been affected by a series of incidents and accidents.”

“The way I look at this situation is the following: We don’t want to solve the problem [with the H225] and move forward,” the CEO said. “We want to use this crisis to re-challenge as much as we can and go out of the crisis being much stronger, much better in the way we deliver safety for this industry.”

He noted that Airbus took a similar initiative after the 2013 crash of a CHC Scotia AS332L2 near Sumburgh in the Shetland Islands killed four passengers. The U.K. Air Accidents Investigation Branch said the flight crew’s failure to use flight instruments effectively during the non-precision instrument approach “allowed the helicopter to enter a critically low energy state, from which recovery was not possible.” Another contributing cause was the pilots’ failure to “make optimum use of the helicopter’s automated systems” during the approach.

That investigation prompted Airbus to develop — in league with operators and the offshore safety advocacy group Helioffshore — a new manual to help flight crews understand how the aircraft’s automation features and flight modes are designed to function. The Flight Crew Operating Manual draws on experience with similar manuals used by pilots of Airbus airliners. Airbus also has developed one for the H175, and other OEMs on doing the same for their aircraft targeted at the offshore market.

“We reviewed the situation and we challenged ourselves” after the Sumburgh accident, Faury said. “What can we do better? What can we bring to the industry? We’re doing the same now.”

He said Airbus Helicopters is examining a number of technologies and processes, but “we strongly believe there is a much broader use of [health and usage monitoring systems (HUMS)] to be made.”

The result may be a data and analytical system that evolves from today’s HUMS.  “Obviously we can make better use of data, with more monitoring of the helicopter, more sensors on board,” Faury said, with products and services based on digital data transferred from the helicopter. “Using ‘big data’ and automation of the treatment of it, you can capture a lot of feedback and a lot of information on how the products are behaving in flight.”

Faury said the helicopter work should benefit from his unit’s membership in the Airbus Group, “which has a very strong digital initiative. We are a part of a bigger perspective, a bigger picture moving forward.”