Arkroyal:
I'm concerned about the AAIB's addition of their seemingly irrelevant remarks on intervention time, which I believe distract from the lessons of this accident.
The report says that it is possible in an R44, under certain regimes of flight, for Nr to fall from the level at which the horn is activated to an unrecoverable value in as little as two seconds.
Now hold on there... how many light helicopters would, without intervention, take any more than two seconds to reduce from 97 percent to an unrecoverable value at max pitch in a climb? If the certification criteria for helicopters were changed to reflect the AAIB's concern, I suspect it would take out every helicopter up to and including the 206.
Steve Hislop must have had the lever in his armpit to sustain a virtually level turn at 120 knots in a 44 and may well have overpitched it, but the gyrations of his helicopter from the moment it apparently went IMC would indicate that the jig was up long before the main rotor hit the tailboom.
To my mind, the mandate to fly five hours on instruments for a PPL (H) is the most disastrous piece of nonsense the JAAs have come up with. A lot of helicopter students are immensely capable, self-confident people. We show them how to fly on instruments, we give them five hours experience of instrument flying – more than virtually any other exercise – then we tell them not to do it. What we've done is change the little voice in the backs of their minds that used to say: "I'm dead if I go in there" to say "there is another option..."
If the five-hour instrument requirement was wise, then this accident would not have happened. Time to get rid of it.