Overspeeds on the R22 can and do occurr when in flight also, a very well known FTO rented to me on SFH basis one of their R22's what they omitted to tell me was that it had suffered from an overspeed by one student pilot whilst with one Fi and it reached in excess of 115%, I was the lucky guy who next flew this by now heap of scrap, one problem with any helicopter is the walk round pre flight, you can look and touch and rock about and twist things around, do all you full and free and then you Ts&Ps on start up, what you cant see are the stretched and completly goosed rotor bearings that are in the teetering head, and as far as I know there really is no way these can be checked from the pre-flight.
But dear reader, once airborne and reaching the types of velocity to start flying this problem will show its self, I am only here today I think because I weigh 90Kgs and have previously wrastled big things on farms, the stick shake that was induced from about 38knts was so severe I couldnt raise my thumb to press the radio button to declare a problem, I was forced to carry on and kept to a minimum of 500ft whislt working out what I had to do, the tide was in I couldnt land on the beach so I had to fly a long gently looping arc to get back to the field, after locking off the collective and using that free hand to comm with the tower, I then concentrated on getting that giant vibrator back to the ground, whilst doing my best to fly over green field and to miss the housing and factories that abound around EGNH, the fact that I am here tells you I got down, with the help of the tower by keeping everyone well away from me until I had got back down to hover taxi speed, when at that point the giant vibrator stopped.
After I had landed and done my run down and after flight checks I still couldnt see anything wrong with the rotor, or head despite now knowing something had happened to it and was sadly wrong, but as I was very slowly walking in I was met by certain people who proffessed they had forgotten to red card the Heli.
What I wonder would have been said if I had gone in!! needless to say that crowd of cowboys has never since had any money from me.
But I still dont know how you would see overspeed damage on any preflight
Vfr