SÛRETÉ DU QUÉBEC PHOTO
volunteer aerial search organizations from Ontario (the Civil Air Search and Rescue Association, or CASARA) and Québec (Sauvetage et recherche aériens du Québec, SERABEC), and the Sûreté du Québec (Québec’s provin- cial police service). The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) determined that the search efforts all told came to involve 12 fixed-wing aircraft and 6 helicopters, 44 air- borne personnel, and at least 77 administrative, logistics, and public relations staff on the ground. Those figures don’t include some 21 aircraft flown by private citizens who volunteered to survey terrain on the periphery of the JRCC’s search zones. Because the pilot owned other properties to the north and northwest of Lac-De La Bidière, the initial search area was more than double that of the plausible envelope around feasible routes to Sainte-Sophie. The
triangulation calculations on Jul. 24, pinpointing a spe- cific location. The following day, ground-based searchers found the helicopter in dense forest 193 m (633 ft.) from that point. The pilot’s body was still strapped into his seat, but the passenger was found 66 m (217 ft.) away.
The Investigation The helicopter was found upright on a rocky outcrop- ping. Both tanks contained uncontaminated 100LL gaso- line, and the engine showed no evidence of any pre-impact mechanical failure. Both drive belts were in good condition and correctly tensioned. The main rotor mast and head were still attached to the main gearbox, but the tail rotor and stabilizers had separated from the tail boom. The tail rotor blades were largely undamaged. Damage to the surrounding trees suggested a near-verti- cal descent.
Damage to trees at the crash site indicated the
accident aircraft experienced a
near-vertical descent.
JRCC ruled out the northern portion on Jul. 13, three days after the helicopter disappeared, reducing the search area from 26,750 to 11,320 sq km (10,328 to 4,371 sq. mi.). Triangulation from the last towers to ping the pilot’s and passenger’s cell phones allowed the JRCC to concentrate on the swath surrounding a flight to Saint-Sophie, further narrowing the search area to 3,600 sq km (1,390 sq. mi.) on Jul. 16 and eventually to 2,058 sq km (795 sq. mi.). By Jul. 21, the search teams had overflown the entire area multiple times without success. In the absence of new information, the JRCC terminated the operation that same day, transferring responsibility to the Sûreté du Québec.
“More precise data” informed a fresh round of 64 ROTOR JUNE 2021
One of the two main rotor blades, arbitrarily designated blade A, was bent in several places. The other blade, blade B, was straight but fractured at its tip. Neither showed the kind of leading- edge damage that would typically result from striking a tree while turning. Numerous deformations in their upper and lower skins suggested the blades had been subject to bending both upward and downward as they began to flap due to loss of centrifugal force at low rpm. Blade B also showed evidence of torsional (twisting) stress that apparently pre- ceded the flapping. The main rotor blades, part num- ber C016-2, were original to the air-
craft, which had been imported to Canada new in 2009. This blade’s design fills the space between the stainless steel leading-edge spar and the trailing-edge doubler with an aluminum alloy honeycomb core covered by stainless steel skins on its upper and lower surfaces and terminated by an aluminum tip cover (see illustration, opposite). A spray adhesive is used to bond the honey- comb to the spar and doubler and the skins to all three of those components. After multiple other instances of the spar–skin joint debonding near the blade tip on this blade model, the design was made subject to FAA Airworthi ness Directive (AD) 2014-23-16, which requires a visual inspection for exposed metal at the spar–lower skin joint before the first flight of the day; repetitive 100-hour inspections by a
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