Originally Posted by
noflynomore
One more thing. Shoulder harness. No way anyone survives if someone falls over the stick for whatever reason. Utterly daft not to wear it.
A very good point! However, this R44 was only equipped with the standard "automotive style" seat belts. All 4 pax were wearing them.
In a Robinson, the "Five-Point Shoulder Harness System" is an optional extra (additional USD 2,750 on the 2014 price list), and only available for the front seats. The downside of this 5-point harness system is that it requires an additional crossbar to be installed, in parallel to the existing cross bar but some 20 cm higher.
Not only drastically reduces this the experience of spaciousness of the back seat pax, but more importantly, the new crossbar is in the exact trajectory of the heads of the rear pax, should they be flung forward
(hence the slight padding visible in the picture above). So you reduce one risk in front, but introduce a new problem in the back! In the balance of probabilities, many owners decide against the 5-point harness system.
Another problem is that here the inertia reels cannot be locked manually (as flying the aircraft requires to be able to lean forward, e.g., to set the DI or to operate the moving map visible in this pic above, and in the mishap flight video).
There have been cases (
http://www.pprune.org/rotorheads/589...ml#post9640834) where - despite should harness - the initial speed of the pilot's torso moving forward was not fast enough to auto-lock the inertia reels, and the pilot was still pushed onto their cyclic control.