Super Puma Makes First UK Passenger Flight Since Grounding

Oil and Gas People has obtained footage of the Airbus H225 making it's debut passenger flight since the fatal Turoy accident in 2016. The restrictions on the aircraft were lifted by the UK CAA back in July 2017.

[@Jurflip2]

Airbus Helicopters seems to have made only two mechanical changes to the gear box after the latest crash: previously the company used planet gears from two suppliers in the gear box. The crashes have all been associated with planet gears from one of the suppliers. AH now only use planet gears from the "safe"supplier. The second change is the provision of better magnetic plugs to detect spalling earlier and more reliably. The other changes are all operational: reduction of the maximum operating time of the gear box by a factor of four, more frequents inspections and better protection against possible external damage of the box or contamination of the box during inspections or servicing. These measures should suffice to make the Super Puma's as reliable as the machines of the competition. I would imagine though that the down time and the operating costs are going to be higher than before due to the increased inspections, servicing and more frequent routine replacement of parts. Some comments of the Norwegian investigation team are interesting. They suggest that the gear box of the Super Puma may be operating at the edge of its capabilities, i.e. it may not be really adequate for the combination of aircraft weight and engine power of the aircraft. They were also critical of the fact that the failure of a single planet gear resulted in catastrofic destruction of the gear box, with seperation of the main rotor. They suggested that the Super Puma should probably have an entirely new and more robust gear box, which should incorporate a fail-safe design, i.e. that mechanical failure of the box (failure of one or more drive gears) should not result in seperation of the rotor. In the end though, Airbus helicopters have been in the helicopter business for more than 60 years, starting with Sud Aviation in the early fifties of the previous century. They have built a number of iconic and super reliable machines. I have no doubt that the measures taken will make the Super Puma as safe as any large helicopter, if the safety measures are followed religiously. The reputation of the machine has been damaged though. There are a lot of various iterations of the Puma flying all over the world and if somebody, somewhere, is lax with maintenance/inspections and another crash occurs due to rotor separation, the Super Puma will be finished.

[@Jurflip2]

Interesting article in a recent "Vertical" magazine about a US company, Air Center Helicopters, that is now flying 17 H225s. They acquired the machines after the rotor separation incidents. After extensive research, they apparently came to the conclusion that the machines were ideal for their purposes and were as safe as any big helicopter in the world today.

[@energypeople4098]

Got a link to that article?

[@geertzwager1309]

www.verticalmag.com/features/air-center-helicopters-all-in/

[@truthful3777]

Well research of operational usage is different than research of the Main Gear Box issue..... Definitely operational usage is no problem. But they did not do research on MGB, what is the problem with MGB? Is it operating at its limit? Should a new design be made that have a better loading factor meaning oversized the MGB. Remember the H225 came from a small medium size Helicopter but stretch to be big in later stage. Are they still using the same MGB design. I trust Airbus should redesign a new heavy weight helicopter from scratch with rooms for overload. It is now like Boeing MAX with a " Fix" to a flawed aircraft.

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