It is interesting that the S92 now has Pilots pulling up the collective lever in lieu of the parking brake lever.
I say it is interesting in that this happened on the S76 in the Company for which I worked but much later in its operating life.
They were called "action slips" and what happened was that the Co-pilot reached over to select the parking brake on but actually grabbed a handful of collective. To my knowledge this happened twice in our Company and both times the helicopter got airborne and some damage was caused with the subsequent heavy landing but the bizarre aspect was that we had been operating the aircraft for some10 years before it happened at all.
I'm an engineer so fail to see why this should happen?
Our pilots of course wanted modifications of some kind to ensure that it couldn't happen again - what about root cause and our new Safety Management Systems? That was the route we took at the time but Pilots weren't happy - worrying that someone would do it again !!
