Agaricus, sometimes commonsense should prevail, but job pressure sometimes overrides. At the time I'd just spent close to 11 hours stacking up a couple thousand head of cattle and theres only 15 more minutes before they are in the holding paddock, its 30 minutes back to camp and about an hour left of daylight, and I'm in the middle of woop woop. Mags checked fine, if you can't tell what the rotor speed should sound like with 20 000 hours then maybe you may not be on, or even near the ball, the machine was well maintained so everything had been working up until then, except the broken earth straps obviously.
Today I'd kick any young fellas bumpart if he even thought of doing what I did. And in hindsight I'd kick my own.