Our Continuing Airworthiness Manager, Michael Snowden, shares what's involved in some regular maintenance.
An account from Continuing Airworthiness Manager, Michael Snowdon, about why helicopter parts are more expensive than you think.
At 5pm on Sunday 31 Auguest, the night shift Pilot reported an FADEC degraded Amber caution when he tried to start the engines. After consultation with the Flight Manual he found the below alert. In response, he, grounded the aircraft and sought engineering assistance.
Our locally-employed engineer was able to attend almost immediately, and, having previous experience of this defect and with superb fault diagnosis skills, he was able to identify that the engine control switch could be at fault. Below are the fault codes obtained from the aircraft recording system.
The below illustration depicts the location of the engine control panel.
The engineer drove into work to remove the engine control panel from the aircraft. Below is a picture of the panel removed from the aircraft, the faulty switch is partially removed. All the wires that go into the back of the switch were slowly extracted (using the red/white pin extractor) one at a time, before being inserted into the new switch.
Once the wiring work was completed, the control panel was installed on the aircraft and several functional tests were performed before finally the Pilot was called to perform engine ground runs to confirm the new switch was working correctly.
Due to the dedication of the Engineering team, and the previous planning decision to purchase a spare switch to be held in stock at Exeter, the repairs were completed and the aircraft was back on line just 2hrs after the initial call from the pilot.
Any guesses as to the price of the offending engine start switch? (pictured below)
If your guess was under £1,000 then you need to go a little higher. The actual price is an eye watering £1,380.
Why is it so expensive? You may ask… The simple answer is all parts that we fit onto the helicopter have to certified for use in aviation; this means all parts within the switch have to be traceable, fire tested where applicable, safe to use and certified as such. This means you can typically add a zero, or a couple of zeros, to the first price you might think of – for any helicopter part. For example, a helicopter wiper blade for the H145 GDAAS is over 300 euros!
If you enjoyed our blog by our Continuing Airworthiness Manager, there are more blogs for those who love the forensic and technical aspects our engineers encounter daily, like this one about our aircraft.
