Fascinting to hear all these authoratative N American statements about the hazards of autos to grass- leaving nothing to chance, too much risk of a trip-up, too much hazard etc etc...
I suppose they think that way because as they dont do them they simply don't know the reality...It seems strange that an environment so much more practical aviation minded than Europe can hold such a widespread misapprehension.
In UK and
afaik most, if not all of Europe autos are invariably done to grass, never, ever to the hard and we have no problems with it. The tripups our transatlantic cousins seem so fearful of simply don't happen. It's perhaps worth notng that many of our airfields where helo training takes place simply don't have hard runways so even if we did spend out on costly skid shoes they wouldn't be much help.
We also practice stuck pedal and simulated t/r failure to grass as well. Sure, it requires care to ensure you're straight enough on landing but it works and again we suffer no accidents, so why scrape the **** out of runways and expensice skidshoes unnecessarily?
That said, our t/r failure and stuck pedal drills may well be a bit less realistic (or perhaps mpre constrained in the parameters that can be demonstrated) but we do all understand that in the event of a real one we much prefer a hard runway.