Helicopter safety relies on Mettler Toledo

Citation

(1999), "Helicopter safety relies on Mettler Toledo", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 71 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/aeat.1999.12771bad.006

Helicopter safety relies on Mettler Toledo

Helicopter safety relies on Mettler Toledo

Keywords Helicopters, Mettler Toledo, Safety

Crucial safety checks on rotor blades and other spare parts for North Sea helicopters are being performed with the aid of Mettler Toledo's precision weighing equipment.

Strategically located at Scotland's Dyce Airport, close to the off-shore oil industry's central base in Aberdeen, Rotortech Ltd provides a component repair and maintenance service for parent company, Bond Helicopters, as well as independent operators shipping drilling crews and stores to and from the North Sea rigs.

The overhaul of rotor blades is a major part of Rotortech's service and involves both repairing and repainting the blades and then checking that they are correctly balanced by mounting one end on a pivot and measuring the load exerted from the uplifted tip on a 60kg capacity KP60 scale.

So critical are the factors that can affect the rotor's performance that the scale is also employed to weigh out the resin ingredients used to repair the blades, and to check that new paintwork has been evenly applied by weighing the blades before and after they have been sprayed. Yet another application is weighing cylinders of CO₂ gas for the helicopters' self-inflatable life rafts in order to ensure they are fully charged in the event of an emergency ditching.

Rotortech's production manager said that the company is so pleased with the performance of the Mettler Toledo equipment that it has now installed one of the Leicester based company's new, budget-price Spider scales to weigh boxes of finished spares for despatch to customers.

"Precision and accuracy are the watchwords that govern every aspect of our work and why we have always been a great believer in using Mettler Toledo scales for all critical weighing procedures", he said.

Details from Mettler Toledo Ltd, 64 Boston Road, Beaumont Leys, Leicester LE4 1AW, UK.