Now imagine you need to be at 2,400 feet to get over the pass, and the peaks are at or above your altitude, and the instructor announces a power failure… in a Robinson R22 (Lycoming O-320, 124 max. continuous horsepower) with two heavy guys in it on a 95ºF Southern California day.
Autorotate? No worries. Climb back to 2,400 feet under those conditions after coming to a hover? Annoying.
I knew that 
And that was exactly the too-narrow thinking I was trying to dispel in any other readers.
During preflight pilots have legitimate needs to be in proximity to stopped props & to move them. And IMO it’s only by understanding that almost any prop motion *might *trigger a fatal accident will folks be careful enough every time, not just most of the time.
As you say, there’s almost never a legit reason to have any part of your body in the prop arc, and certainly nothing other than fingertips while moving the prop. But sometimes entering the arc is necessary and it’s a task best done with total awareness of the size & placement of the lion’s mouth & the strength of his bite.
Well put. I used to teach students to treat the prop like a firearm - always assume it’s loaded and ready to shoot.
Had my finger tips spanked a time or two over the years.
Personally know a guy who’s wife was killed at Oshkosh when an aircraft started up. Really nasty.
I’m always paranoid over engine compression checks during annuals. compressed air can really fling a prop around.
This, this, this… ↑↑↑ :smack:
Hand-propping isn’t exactly safe, but it’s sure the time everybody involved is concentrating hard on prop risk.
it’s all those *other *times which bite folks.
Except in Family Flight.
I ordered some stuff from Sporty’s today. I don’t pay attention to their airplane sweepstakes because there’s no way in Hell I’ll ever win. But I looked at it today. The sweepstakes airplane is a factory-build Vans RV-12, which is a Light Sport aircraft. I take it that E-LSA means Experimental LSA? I looked up Light Sport Aircraft and saw that the factory-built RV-12s are S-LSAs, which I understand to mean Special LSA.
Are S-LSAs actually certified aircraft? Can they be used for commercial purposes, such as flight training or rental?
Reading about the RV-12, I wondered why [del]Cessna[/del] Textron can’t build a viable LSA? Their failed Cessna 162 Skycatcher cost – what? $175,000? A factory-built RV-12 with all of the options lists (according to their site) for under $124,000. Still expensive, but considering the cost of airplanes in the early-'80s, inflation, incomes, blahblahblahblah, it doesn’t seem really excessive for a new, factory-built aircraft. True, the Skycatcher had a certified Continental O-200and the RV-12 has a Rotax; but AIUI, the 100 hp Rotax in the Vans is also a certified aircraft engine. Maybe if [del]Cessna[/del] Textron had chosen the Rotax, they could have made the Skycatcher affordable.
Anyway, what’s the deal with LSA and commercial use?
That’s my understanding. They’re regular certified factory-built aircraft.
They can, but it’s just too much bother. The money is in the big business airplanes, the ones that sell for 8 digits, not 6. Part of the cost was in transportation to China and back, a deal they made to build relationships there that would ultimately let them sell more Citations there. That decision also disqualified the plane from being considered by many of the Americans who would have bought it, and not been put off by the silly name.
The same engine comes both ways - if you want to not have the U suffix on the engine model, you get to pay extra. The choice of the same engine as on the C-150 was intended to enhance sales to FBO’s as trainers, replacing clapped-out 150’s - they already knew it well and had a stockpile of parts, and its reliability in training operations was well-established, unlike the Rotax.
So, while there was certainly a strong community of interest at Cessna in building both a new primary trainer market and a new LSA market, ultimately top management’s interests were aligned elsewhere.
So where do Top Management expect the pilots to fly their 8-figure machines to come from?
Military and retired airline pilots for a while at least. 
I came across a 1963 Hughes 269A (TH-55) on eBay with a buy-it-now price of $50,000. ‘Needs only annual.’ :dubious:
The seller kindly listed the component times. The good news is that the main rotor blade with the least remaining time has over 1,300 hours left to go. (Last I checked – many years ago – MR blades cost $15,000 each.) The bad news is some of the other components are past their sell-by date. The upper pulley bearing (600 hours life limit) has 694.6 hours on it. The idler pulley bearing (200 hr LL) has 628.5 hours on it. The lower pulley coupling shaft (1,500 hr LL) has 1,556.6 hours. And the Lycoming IO-360-B1A (1,200 hr TBO) has 1,450.2 hours. (The FAA registry says it has a Lycoming O-360-A1D.)
No wonder it’s so cheap! It’s not currently airworthy. I’m a little surprised at the engine TBO. I’ve always assumed Lycomings were 2,000 TBO. And I’m surprised it has flown hundreds of hours beyond the life limit of one component, and tens of hours beyond the life limits of other components. I know that you can fly beyond TBO in non-commercial service, but can you legally fly beyond life limits? Seems like a bad idea to me.
Then there’s the claim that TT is 1,100 hours. I think that’s TT since rebuild, since that’s not very long to require a rebuild and there are components with more time than that. I suspect that this is an ex-Army TH-55 that was ‘used and abused’, or that it had crashed at some point and cobbled together from a bunch of used parts.
I love helicopters. They’re much more fun to fly than fixed-wings. But I can’t help being aware of all of the extremely critical components that are subject to a lot more stress than their fixed-wing counterparts, and that they are in constant motion in a variety of directions. If I could afford a helicopter, I think I’d spend the money for something whose components and maintenance I was sure of.
Not necessarily. The horror stories I’ve heard (harking back to the days when hand-propping was more common), which I mentioned in an earlier post, was that someone would hand-start the prop and then, in a moment of thoughtlessness, step forward and/or bend down to remove the chock from the wheel – right through the prop.
Yeah, but they were not ever counted again after doing that so that always left more of the smart types. Didn’t take long to weed out the stupid ones.
IMO, the two scary ones to do are the Lycoming IO 540 when it is on the front of a Piper Comanche. Almost vertical & very close to the ground & usually with major compression. Also Injection engines are a PITA to get started by hand on the best of days.
Next is a 5 cylinder Kinner radial on the front of a Rayn PT-22 They have major rotation between compression strokes & wind up quick on the first hit. Get a lot of arms broken from hits by the trailing blade. Got to get yourself out of the way quick.
2 easiest, 65 Continental on a J- 3 Cub
R- 1340 on a T- 6. They rap up slow and are at a good height to work with.
YMMV
Aviation does have that Darwinian aspect to it, doesn’t it? 
There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots.
Old pilots never die
They just move to a higher plane
Old pilots never die
They just buzz off
Three most useless things in aviation:
Altitude above you.
Runway behind you.
Fuel on the ground.
Oh, us pilots gots lots of these. Musent use them all to oncet as it would put people out of CG. 
I’ve just registered for AOPA Rusty Pilots Seminar.
