Anonymous

I am an A&P/IA and owner of a Brantly B2B. During the 70's Brantly Hynes operated a very active factory flight school. They flew over 500 hours per month at its peak! A one day record was 28 hours! Single machines amassed as much as 12 to 14 hours per day! That's bears testament to their design and reliability. The maintenance manual covered inspections of the blades and detailed proper maintenance of rotor head and related components. There were no significant problems noted ref cracking rotor blades. Unfortunately as time progressed the machines have been improperly maintained. The blades are fine when installed and maintained per the original Brantly maintenance manual. One individual from New Zealand started this crusade and ultimately Brantly sent an employee(Chris Gerred) to examine his machine. Mr. Gerred reported that the rotor head had been reassembled incorrectly previously with out of phase sloppy rivets in pylons, etc. Obviously the blades would stress and crack given the improper maintenance. Another experienced Brantly owner comments on the New Zealand ship the A/D references "FOR BLADES to crack like that something was definitely rigged wrong, sprag clutch sticking, or bad start up. With a sticking centrifugal clutch the dampners where working hard to debond them(clutch plates). You can see the gray mud from the cages meaning they were working hard. I've been around brantlys and seen a lot - this craft(New Zealand ship) was not right-also there should not be that much grease coming out of the pylon seals" The A/D itself is based on a SB from a Chinese company that has no production certificate-they can't make a single legal part little on a rotor blade! Few used blades would meet the onerous wording in the SB/AD-effectively grounding the entire fleet of Brantlys. This is completely unacceptable. The A/D should be withdrawn and the original maintenance manual blade inspection(which SB111 tries to illegally supercede) followed.