Capacitor Failure and Helicopter Accident

This article explains how safety investigators with the French Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) used chip-level recovery procedures to retrieve recorded flight data that helped them piece together the events that led up to helicopter accident that recently occurred in French Guyana. The recovered data along with eyewitness accounts and findings from an assortment of tests indicated that the failure of a capacitor filtering the output of a current generator inside the engine fuel automatic regulation system obliged the pilot to control fuel regulation manually. Although other factors were involved, as the article explains, the capacitor failure played a major role in the crash.