John E, thanks for the references! With those numbers we may be close to cat A in the winter but pretty far out in the summer. That's more or less what I suspected, I've always expected to best case spread the skids if we had a failure up past 100'.
Crab, that RFM profile sounds pretty similar to what we do during normal ops. The only exception is that after 30 KIAS or so I normally climb while accelerating to about 60 KIAS for max rate of climb. Do you know why they would recommend climbing out at VTOSS instead? Does it give a better ROC when you take the acceleration into account? I would assume that this would only be valid up to a certain distance..
My reasons for backing up during takeoff would be a) keeping the landing area in sight, b) increasing your forward run available and therefore your obstacle clearance, c) to allow a bit of forward drift from the nosedown tendency when you reduce collective, and d) to allow for landing with a "skids level" attitude as opposed to nose up due to the mast tilt (at least for Hueys). Am I off base, or are there others that I'm missing?
Thanks for all the replies!