Ed Price wrote:
>> I asked him whether any helicopters ever used any active charge dissipators. His reply was that he "had seen those things, and that nobody he knew ever thought they worked!" <<<< They work. You find out when they're broken. There was an accident a few decades ago where an Army CH-47 was lost due to an inoperative active discharge system allowing a charge to build up on an aircraft. Don't recall the details, but there was apparently a fuel vapor/air explosion. As I recall (it really has been a few decades) the system was written up inoperative in the logbook. Note that this antistatic system is NOT a low-power box. Cortland