I recall a fairly recent tragic accident not far from here. A man was working on his car, which was on a hydraulic jack. It was not properly supported in that it did not have a secondary method if the jack failed.
He went underneath the car to work on it. Now, we all know that doing this involves a level of risk. Undoubtedly, so did he.
He took the risk, thinking it would probably be all right because the jack had never failed before. But it wasn't. The jack did fail. The car fell on him and crushed him to death. In front of his young son, who frantically tried to lift the car off his father.
My own car is being worked on just now. I jacked it up. I can do as I please with regard to safety because there is no rule telling me what I can and cannot do.
I have axle stands under it. Now it is on axle stands I have lowered and reset the jack, which now backs up the axle stands.
My point here is that safety is about learning from others. No-one should have to make all the mistakes that others have made in the past. If we don't, there is no point having a flight safety system, or training, or regulations and we are, quite frankly, stupid.
The regulations are often there because the authority knows something that others may miss or forget with the passage of time. As wrote earlier, in UK at least it isn't allowed to leave a helicopter's rotors running without a qualified pilot at the controls. Some here consider that rule unnecessary but may have over-riding reasons.
All that can be said now is RIP this poor pilot and the bereaved family. Sadly, something went tragically wrong with what he did, either a human failing, or a mechanical failure of some sort. The report doesn't say which was the ultimate cause of the accident. Hopefully the company involved (and some others) will review their procedures to see if the risk of a further occurrence of this nature can be lowered.
Intensive "Nit picking" and playing with words, merely to try to trip up other contributors, achieves very little except to make those involved look rather silly, imho.
Hopefully a moderator can RIP this thread, too...... because it's achieving nothing
