Originally Posted by
old,not bold
On another occasion, a loader lost all the fingers on one hand trying to stop a very slowly rotating prop by grabbing a blade. The F27-400 had the square ended, very sharp tips on the blades. My maths is not what it was, but even at 30 RPM, with a disc of, say, 12M circumference, each tip is moving at 6m/sec (21.6 KPH, I think) with an enormous amount of energy behind it, but will appear to be almost stopped.
I have in the old days seen a cocky engineer placing his hand on each passing Dowty Rotol blade on the HS-748 as it wound down in its last few rpm. I suppose it caught on as it looked kind of cool.
But there was a petite female apprentice who did this with gloved hand one day. The leading edge of these aircraft had many nicks from gravel operations and when a leading edge blade that had a jagged metal edge caught onto her glove, it picked her up and she went around with the blade. Fortunately no serious injuries.