How Helicopter Fleet Mx is Done at Bristow Academy
By Dale Smith
ack in the mid- ‘70s, I was taking basic helicopter training in bubble-front Bell 47. I can still hear the school’s chief mechanic saying that it took three-hours
of maintenance for every hour the old Bell flew: four after I’d flown it. I wasn’t that bad. Really, helicopters just
require a lot of maintenance. And if you think taking care of one is a load, imagine what it’s like trying to keep a fleet of 71 piston and turbine helicopters, spread across three U.S. facilities, in the air an average of 2,500-hours a month. That’s the challenge facing Bristow Academy’s director of maintenance, Todd Smith and his crew of A&P technicians and support personnel. “Because of the lower operational cost, we use a fleet of
piston Schweizer (Sikorsky) 269-C1s (S300) and Robinson R44s and R22s for most of our training,” he said. “We also have a dozen Bell 206’s that we use for turbine transitions, NVG training and mountain training.”
Smith said that while the fleet is
very robust and reliable, their charge of keeping some 58 piston helicopters airworthy every day is a huge departure from maintaining Bristow’s large turbine helicopters in the field. “It’s especially tough in a training
environment because our helicopters come and go all day long,” he explained. “If you look at our field bases in the Gulf of Mexico. The helicopters typically go out in the morning and come back in the evening. Most of the maintenance is done at night.” “It’s a different type of pressure here because our fleet operates on two-hour slots,” Smith said, “and there are a lot of discrepancies that pop up between flights
when you are changing crews, pilots and missions. If there’s a problem, we have a short amount of time to get if fixed or the slot is lost. We can’t afford to have helicopters sitting on the ground.” Smith said that to help maintain good planning and communications between technicians and shifts, Bristow’s maintenance managers hold meetings with their technicians each morning at 06:30.
“The first shift is going by 07:00 and then there’s another meeting at 13:00 focused on the jobs we think the second shift can finish that day,” he said. “It sounds like a lot of planning, but reality is that often by 11:00 all bets are off and we’re just dealing with what has been thrown at us that day.”
New Helicopters/Old Skills While Bristow Academy’s training fleet represents the best of piston helicopter technology, understandably
Aviation Maintenance |
avm-mag.com | February / March 2013 19
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