Don’t be paranoid, Lu. I have no vested interest beyond hanging my butt on them. Do you have a vested interest in doing him down?
Every manufacturer is invited to participate in accident investigations. Frank Robinson’s establishment of the factory safety course and his in-house insurance programme (which offered discounts on condition of training in certain areas) were established before Georgia Tech, before the promulgation of any FARs. It was these, plus the change in the 50-hour rule, which reduced the accident rate (from 6 per 1000,000 in 1990 to 1.2 per 100,000 in 1995). He has always gone “naked,” ie has carried no liability insurance and has fought every lawsuit. If you produce aircraft you’re going to get lawsuits, full stop. And you’re going to lose them, guilty or not.
It’s about time this airy notion that you can be flying along happily in an Robinson and all of a sudden the rotor takes off and flies through the tail boom was put to rest. The NTSB certainly have given up on it. I have seen correspondence between the Board and Robinson congratulating him on being “off our radar screen.” The rotor blade will remove the tail boom for you if the RRPM falls below a certain value, by which time the jig’s up and you have no further use for a tail boom anyway. It will also whip the boom off if you respond wrongly in a low-g situation. It’s a characteristics of a two-bladed rotor. The US military produced information films on it for Vietnam pilots in the 60s. Robinson didn’t invent it. Thanks to Robinson, helicopters were introduced to a massive audience of low-time pilots, and that’s where the problem is, not in the head.
There are good sound reasons why Robinsons are the most popular helicopters in the world, outselling all other civilian helicopters put together. It’s not because we’re all stupid, or venal, or careless. It’s because they are sound machines which do the job cost-effectively and safely, if you don’t take a lend of them. They’ve become established despite the best efforts of other manufacturers to foster doubt and uncertainty, and despite the efforts of snobbish pilots flying larger machines, usually paid for by someone else, to denigrate them.