By Ken Pole | September 2, 2011 Estimated reading time 3 minutes, 34 seconds.
Mike Reyno Photo.The Royal Canadian Air Force resumed training with BAe CT-155 Hawks on August 22 after a 10-week operational pause forced by the failure of a low-pressure turbine (LPT) blade in another of the fleet Rolls-Royce Adour turbofans. The investigation continues, but the fact that this was the fifth Adour in the NATO flying training in Canada (NFTC) program to have blade failure the pilots of the four earlier ones landed safely has prompted the Canadian Forces to require Rolls-Royce to replace all low-pressure turbine blades at 400 flying hours instead of the rated 2,000 hours.
Canada began flying Hawks in 2000 under the auspices of the NFTC program, a partnership with Bombardier. Crashes have been few and far between, the first in July 2003 when a task-overloaded student on his third solo managed a gear-up landing. The following May, a bird struck a Hawk angle-of-attack probe and was then ingested by the engine, forcing the IP and student to eject safely at 3,000 feet. In April 2008, another IP and student were injured in a low-altitude ejection after an engine failure. All three occurred at 15 Wing Moose Jaw, Sask. The latest, June 10 at 4 Wing Cold Lake, Alta., occurred when two instructor pilots were checking out a student in another Hawk. Lt.-Col. Lee Vogan and Capt. Jens Lundgreen-Nielsen, both of whom ejected at 2,500 feet, attributed their survival to their training and their aircraft condition. The training works, the equipment is second to none and the technicians keep our aircraft in excellent condition, Vogan told reporters at the time.
An expected domino effect on lead-in training to CF-18 Hornets, with the next elements scheduled to start in November and May, was forestalled by having five Canadian students sent to Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training (ENJJPT), a sister program for NATO pilots at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas. Col. Marc Bigaouette, Commander 15 Wing and Military Director of the NFTC program, told Canadian Skies that this avoided any need to recover from what otherwise would have been a 10-week backlog. However, he added, a decision to send pilots from Singapore or Hungary or any other country to ENJJPT rests with their country of origin.
As for the LPT blade failure itself, Bigaouette said that although we know what failed, it is going to require a lot of effort to gain an appreciation of why that particular blade failed on this engine. We have built up a lot of knowledge about the Adour over the years and . . . we’ve already done a lot of thinking about this. We were very much in a good position in the Canadian Forces to bring in our own engineers, in collaboration with Bombardier and Rolls-Royce, to work together towards a solution that will allow the aircraft to fly. There lots of work still to be done, but there absolutely no doubt in our minds that with the mitigation in place we have a safe operation again.
