Got a gent at our local field who owns an R-22 - for those of you who don’t know, it’s not a particularly speedy aircraft, even by helicoptor standards.
Anyhow - he’s flown it from Indiana to the Pacific Ocean in California and back twice in the last six months.
We can’t figure out where he gets the money
We can’t figure out how he can stand spending that many hours at a time in a teeny tiny helicoptor.
But no one questions his cross-country skills.
I’m not sure if this applies here but I was reading several month’s ago that many air accidents are deemded “pilot error” because the insurance companies have “sublimits” in the passenger policies.
Meaning, they don’t have to pay over a “certain” amount to survivors if the accident is “pilot error” or no fault.
In other words,“Non-negligence on behalf of the airlines.” releases them from huge lawsuits.
May explain some things
Indiana to the coast twice in just six months? He must have gotten a speedy one! 
(Actually the R-22 is faster than the Schweizer 300CB I’d been flying; but the 300CB is roomier.)
From IN to CA, I can see.
It’s the “and back” part that makes me wonder 
Back to AA587, the NTSB issued a safety bulletin about pilot training and use of the rudder in February of this year.
The thing that stands out in the bulletin was the description of what, exactly, manuvering speed means in terms of aircraft design. I understood that to be the speed at which you can make a full control input from one stop to the other without having to worry about bits and pieces coming off.
With the rudder, at least, that is not true. From the Safety Bulletin:
The bulletin also goes into the ease with which this can happen, even with a limiter and recommendations for training to prevent overuse of the rudder.
What it boils down to is that even if the aircraft is at or below the manuvering speed, if you go from full left rudder to full right rudder, the tail could snap off.
In what is looking like the preferred NTSB scenario for the crash of AA587, wake turbulance caused an upset of the aircraft. The pilot (or autopilot) applied rudder movements to correct these swings. Somewhere along the line, the nose of the aircraft was swinging in one direction, much as if rudder had been applied. In response, a correcting rudder movement was made in the opposite direction. Since the aircraft was already in a yaw, the stress of the correcting movement would be much like going from full-stop to full-stop with the rudder.
Result is the broken tail.
Do a search on “AA587 rudder” and you will find many more theories and articles out there.
Obviously.
The problem is that it shouldn’t.
The definition of green arc is “speeds at which full deflection of any control surface, in any sequence, CANNOT damage the aircraft”.
What we have now is a little asterisk after that statement which reads “except A300-600’s”
The certification test was deficient to require only a single deflection from neutral to stop, without then requiring a second deflection to opposite stop.
What we have is a situation wherein, if the pilot stomps on the wrong pedal, then the correct one, everybody dies.
That is not acceptable, and, if you go through the history of the investigatio at www.ntsb.gov , you will find that A300-600’s have been known to initiated uncommanded tail wagging, and the FDR is wired in such a way as to make it nearly impossible to tell if 587’s rudder deflections were commanded or not[sup]*[/sup]