Similar to the above, I recall some thirty years ago, meeting a very shaken ground crew chap who had just been inadvertently 'taken for a ride' whilst perched on the maintenance platform on the rear pylon of a Chinook, from one end of a field to the other. I think he had been carrying out a leak check.....he needed a personal leak check afterwards.

Well no I didn’t push for it. I was asked to facilitate it and did some training with some engineers, several of whom went on to do “solo” groundruns. This was because with Bristow now owning Norsk, and Norsk always having had engineer ground runs, the question was asked why it couldn’t be done in the U.K. It had been banned by the ANO but the ANO was subtly changed (to align with EASA) to require a qualified pilot at the controls of any running helicopter - adding that was running for the purposes of flight. So engineer groundruns became legal in U.K.

It was limited to the EC225 because that had a collective lock, a cyclic centring button, and a pretty foolproof autostart sequence, so the engineers didn’t need to touch the collective just guard the cyclic, and it was one switch to start up. They were briefed that if anything went awry they should switch the engine off and apply then rotor brake. Which is what any pilot would do. I remember when as a very junior copilot I was authorised to groundrun an S61 (rushed through so the captains could languish in the warm crew room) I didn’t really have much of a clue and the level of safety for the engineers was IMO significantly higher for them than me due to the above-mentioned features.

It died a death for some reason I’m not sure of (a lot of other stuff was going on at the time) but engineer allowances could well be it.

One could see potential issues but I’m not sure those issues were significantly less safe than a dozy 6am pilot doing it. We had plenty of cockups from them! eg rotor brake left on for the entire proceedings resulting in the aircraft destroyed by fire. Sometimes a slightly anxious new person is safer than an ancient person who has 1000s of hours experience with nothing going wrong. Complacency in other words.

A good summary.