A note of interest: I'm flying a Safari, have 250hrs and have not had any
real maintenance that was not caused by me fooling around with different
ideas other than oil and filter change. The CHR factory ship, I believe,
just reached 2,000 hrs. It has received numerous mods and a lot of updates
and general trial and error designs. I have been involved with the
experimental helicopter community since 1995 and have some opinions about
reliability, but nothing really based on database analysis. Some Rotorways
have a bunch of hours successfully, I can think of one guy who has logged
over 1,000 hrs Rotorway time, but I don't know how many ships were involved.
Don't know how the Jet Execs are standing up, but I think that I've heard of
several gearbox failures. Most of these gearboxes were sprint car variants.
I guess one thing to think about is the title of " Experimental". None of
the Safaris that I know of are exact copies of the other. I doubt if many
of the Rotorways are carbon copies of each other. I don't believe that any
attempt at categorizing different ships as being more or less reliable makes
any kind of sense due to the variability of each ship manufactured by each
builder. If someone wants a really reliable helicopter, then they had best
be looking at the certified ships where a reliability study has a chance of
being more meaningful.

--
Stuart Fields
Experimental Helo magazine
P. O. Box 1585
Inyokern, CA 93527
(760) 377-4478
(760) 408-9747 general and layout cell
(760) 608-1299 technical and advertising cell

www.vkss.com
www.experimentalhelo.com


"Flyingmonk" wrote in message
oups.com...
Jim wrote:
True, but "I" wouldn't want to be flying one at 1550 hours when something
major broke, just as predicted by the "parts supplier."

You wont get an argument from me on that one Jim. ; ^). Like I said
befo

Anyways, not many of them have more than
300hrs total and 80%+- of that 300 hrs is hovering and testing time
anyways, from what I hear.

So more than likely, the 1,500hr airframe retirement time is
irrelavent. Maybe the factory ship will reach that mark maybe not.

I doubt that any customer's machine will reach that point, but than
again, they are flying them a whole lot in England from what I gleamed
in PPRUNE's Rotorhead forum.

Bryan "The Monk" Chaisone