I had an instructor cut the power on me in an R22 climbing away from the airfield at 300ft. It went like this - <closes throttle> says, "the engine has just failed what are you going to do about it" I say, "What"!? . . Slight pause and he takes over and completes a 180 auto back inside the airfield boundary.
Well... presuming you took off into wind, a 180 has you turning back downwind and executing a nice downwind auto in about 10 seconds after the power was lost.
The awesome abilities of most instructors never ceases to amaze me, however assuming my less impressive skills allowed me to recognise the problem in time, with a 10 second window I'd pretty much be going down to flare into whatever's ahead of me, which is why I usually go to the upwind end of the airfield/take off area to start my departure so if it happens that low I'm still over the nice grassy bits.
And I dumped an R22 for an R44 pretty much for the reasons stated above: I had more confidence as a low hours ppl that I would be able to sort out a 44 EF than a 22. That's as close to following TC's delicately articulated advice as I could afford to go!
It's unarguable that having the lowest hours pilots in the aircraft that require some of the fastest responses to an engine failure is less than ideal. It all comes down to money: if it's all you can afford and you're prepared to take the risk, you have to do it, but the carriage of pax is on your own conscience (I rarely carried them in a 22 sub 200 hours).
Lafite