Originally Posted by
FH1100 Pilot
Hmm, a practice auto demo that resulted in a crash? Sounds like your instructor wasn't very proficient in autos! We will be interested to read the final report to see how much...or how little...experience this instructor has. (Wrecking a brand-new R-44? I suppose he is an ex-employee of Takeflight now.) Anyway, lesson learned: Any time you roll the throttle off in a helicopter, expect the engine to quit. Just expect it, no big deal. Harry Reasoner's treatise on helicopter pilots still applies. Or ought to.
On the contrary, no ifs ands or buts, he saved our lives. I don't know why the engine quit, but it did, and he put us down with zero injuries. He is not an ex-employee, and I'm very grateful that the flight school continues to trust him to perform his job as he had long before what happened to us, and I'm also very grateful that he had practiced hundreds upon hundreds of autos before.
If anyone is to blame it's the anachronistic state of technology that the aviation sector finds itself in outside of corporate and large commercial carriers. I'm from the tech sector, and I'm frankly embarrased by how little advancement the industry has made since I got my SEL ticket over a decade ago by skrimping and scraping for every hour. When I came back to get current, the C172 I got into was older than me, had wires hanging out of the dash, and oil dripping onto the nose gear tire, and then for some reason the instructor told me not to use the rudder to coordinate turns (suspect they'd had maintenance issues). Needless to say I did not take a second flight before just moving on to my rotorwing training.
Because of this we run into policies at flight schools that don't allow full-down autos, or off-airport landings, because of the inherent possiblility of damage to the aircraft. How on earth are you supposed to do the right thing in an emergency situation if you never get the chance to actually practice the full maneuver?
If you care about this industry, you might want to direct your bile somewhere more productive than the people trying to make it something better everyday, taking their and their student's lives into their hands with subpar equipment harangued by regulation and the old guard. I think soon a lot of us are going to wake up to a disruption to aviation as big as spacex did to the fat and happy incumbent space industry.