CASE STUDY: AWAY FROM HOME
Real-life stories may be the best way to illustrate the benefits of the Foresight MX predictive HUMS system. Bechhoefer already has plenty of these stories only a few years after introducing his invention.
One event involved a pilot who was hundreds of miles away from his home base while conducting power line inspections. He called in to report low engine power, and requested a maintenance test to see if the aircraft was safe to fly.
Before having the Foresight tool, the chief mechanic would have needed to fly out to the helicopter with his tools and inspect it in person, taking him away from his base duties and leaving the helicopter temporarily out of service.
But instead, Foresight allowed the mechanic to assess the helicopter remotely. He logged on to the Internet to review the machine and flight data that Foresight had automatically uploaded to the cloud and transformed into an interactive dashboard. The mechanic noticed an orange health indicator in the mechanical diagnostics area of the dashboard. Digging into the diagnostics a
little deeper, he could see that engine performance was trending dramatically upward, indicating a loss of power.
Using his experienced intuition, he clicked over to the exceedances and FDM data. Scanning more than 30 parameters tracked by Foresight, he chose outside air temperature and saw that OAT had dropped over the course of the flight to -5 F, then increased as the aircraft descended.
The mechanic hypothesized that the pilot had turned on bleed air to warm up the cockpit during the polar vortex. The pilot confirmed his hypothesis.
“Knowing that a 7% drop in engine performance was within normal range when bleed air is on, the mechanic was able to confirm that the aircraft was safe to fly – all without leaving the hangar,” Bechhoefer related. “When you add up incremental productivity (revenue) and potential trip costs (savings), this incident had a net benefit to our customer of several thousand dollars.”
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