You never know what may break when you are flying, and there are so many other things that are (more) likely to break… The bad thing about this one is that it would result in a catastrophic failure. You go from cruise power or more to 0% power in the blink of an eye.
Peter, a lot more Contis throw their rods overboard per year than there have been camshaft gear failures.
It’s a combination of:
- how often does it happen
- what’s the economic impact of an AD
- is there really a clear known cause and remedy
Not everything gets addressed and there are many failure modes that could be consider unacceptable.
If 26000 engines get the camshaft replaced to save a few potential failures, how many other maintenance-induced failures may have been set up on otherwise good running engines. A Mooney that had a vacuum pump replaced at a local facility, had an full blown emergency landing in a field because all the oil was blown overboard because of a bad seal installation on the vacuum pump. There was no other damage, but the potential was there, the engine was perfect, just lacking oil. Obviously it was trash afterwards.
Issue resolved. The AD will not be instituted and the Cont. Mandatory service bulletin has been changed as well.
http://www.tcmlink.com/pdf2/CSB05-8C.pdf
this is from TCM