No worries Farang, we must have crossed paths but there has been a fair bit of water around since the light weight blades. I did my conversion in a L/W one in Perth with Shortes and then shortly thereafter a bit more practice in our first one at VRD with L/W blades on. Yeah the autos were swish - shhwish - shhhhwwishh! .That was with the late Les Morris so's I could do the company endorsements on them. Les was a mighty bloke with a flair for the non predictable. We must do some autos he says and he stipulated they be at 52 knots all the way until flare. Hmmm. On the third trip down on a quite warmish day and at least half fuel, halfway thru the flair his larrikin nature allowed him to yell, "Wow look at that, the collective on my side isn't even plugged in." He was waving it around in the cabin demanding my attention, I was done, bloody near scared me witless, bugger him - beer time. One thing though our mustering training and both the BTEC and prior to that the Donkey eradication programs churned out a couple hundred and more mighty fine pilots of whom the company hierarchy were mighty proud and who went on to distinguish themselves all around this globe. Sometimes you might overhear a conversation /argument about who was claiming the prize as the top slave in '82 or whenever. The last contract I filled in the dots for had a list of seventeen pilots at average of 7,500 hours plus, all low level experience. Pretty easy to snooker jobs with those stats.cheers. tet.