4dogs,
Thanks for the link to the past! It is interesting to see that old topics don't just go away!
I have to note one issue with your comment,"did all sorts of things in the AS350 that deliberately generated jack stall. I found it to be predictable, progressive and at the far edges of the envelope compared to normal operations"
Could I ask you to add the note, "so far" to the end of your comment? One thing I have found in testing is that when a problem surfaces, it is not likely to just fix itself. When other pilots have loss of control events, and lose their aircraft in an accident, your evaluation has just been trumped by theirs. We all lose if we decide that something which hurt a buddy is really his fault, so that we apologize for the aircraft, blame the pilot and march on to the next accident.
I coined an aphorism to describe the loop we get into when we are trying to decide if a problem we have found really needs to be fixed. I would write this on the chalk board before we started the meetings to decide if it was a "feature" or a problem:
The size of your problem is proportional to the efforts needed to convince yourself that it is not a problem.
IMHO, Jack Stall is like LTE, a sign of a marginal helicopter that has bitten some of us, but others want to simply blame the pilot. Safety of helicopter flight operations will only be achieved when I, and my counterparts at the other manufacturers, face a raft of indignant pilots constantly trying to make their aircraft better, not a group of apologists who want to blame each other when an aircraft fails them.
Regardless of our collective opinion about how much out of control we will accept, the authorities should not let us debate it. In good military aircraft, there is no debate, and I can promise you, it would be a cold day in Hell before the FAA pilots I fly with would accept jack stall at 1.5 g.