HeliOffshore has published an updated version of its Best Practice Guidelines for Health and Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMS). The latest version includes two new annexes developed by the association’s HUMS working group, which consists of representatives from operators, OEMs and other industry experts.
A subgroup under the leadership of Jason Alamond, HUMS program manager with Era Helicopters, has produced an annex defining the ideal HUM system. The group drew up a list of features that it considered to be useful in a HUM system, as well as those it felt should be eliminated or modified because they are unnecessary or burdensome to users.
The first three sections of the report describe features that the subgroup felt should be included in modern HUM systems. The fourth section of the report turned its attention to ideas for developing a future HUM system, without what the group called, “the constraints of current terminology, architecture or technology.”
Meanwhile, another subgroup has developed a framework of key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess the effectiveness of in-service HUMS. This new annex gives operators a proposed framework for assessing the performance of systems.
The list of 16 KPIs includes different levels of alert and alarm, as well as false alarms, close monitoring initiated events, failures, diagnostic and support system requests, and HUMS deferred defects.
The HUMS KPI subgroup was led by Andy Evans, a director with Aerossurance. He and others on the subgroup envisage the HUMS KPI document as laying the groundwork for operators to be able to share and benchmark HUMS data.
