I must say that I agree with "Ascend Charlieīs" original post!
What he is saying is that, if I understand right, that sometimes you can take the training just a bit to far.. and actually endanger the aircraft and peoples lives by by thinking more (riskier) is better.
Like heīs saying about the night touchdown autoīs, well thatīs just crazy. The chance of anything good coming out of that kind of training is minimal. Of course itīs cool beiing able to say that you did that if you survive it!! But sometimes things can be trained in a much safer way without risking lives. Because a lot of accidents happen during training. Thats a fact.
I would suggest that any check pilot and instructor do try to give students as much training as possible but stiil try to find safe wayīs to train, no horseplay, nothing good will ever come out of it.
Touchdown autoīs should only be practiced in good visbility after having checked out the planned landing area thoroughly. I for example always land first on the planned touchdown spot, even if I was training another student at the some spot only an hour before. I also never do touchdowns in rain. Itīs no good for your depth perception to have raindrops on the windshield and well I really dont think that any of my students are going to kill themselves because they never did a touchdown auto in rain!! I simply change my training methods in bad weather and for example in rain Iīll do a power recovery auto, which we continue tiīll landing. So itīll be like a slow motion engine (off) touchdown auto.
And by the way I have 4000 hrs in helicopters with no accidents or incidents, thereof 2100 hrs are as instructor. I have trained 80 people for the PPL or CPL licence and as far as I know all of them are alive and kicking.