The Cougar incident would have had a pilot doing the runup. My take on this incident is that 92s are normally started with 2 pilots present. One monitors the engine start up, the other looks after the collective/rotor position. Maintenance ground runs, however, are often single pilot and if tired or distracted it would be easy to focus only on the engine side of the start up procedure and forget about the collective.
Looked for a "been there, almost done that" smilie, but there doesn't seem to be one. As js0987 said, it's pretty obvious that the collective hasn't been lowered in a timely fashion once you get used to the aircraft.
Last edited by inputshaft; 20th Nov 2011 at 14:06.