G'day All,

this occurs only if the main rotor blades are not correctly aligned &
tracked - I have had it occur once when after many hours of boring
tracking - i.e. they put strobe reflecting bits on the end of the blades -
for say a 3 bladed job the strobe thingos are sorta like this - | _ / - you
as a pilot pull it into a 3' hover & hold it - the maintenance bloke aims
his strobe gun on the main rotors usually sitting on the top of a ladder -
notes stuff arcane stuff in his little book - sees which one of the 3 is
higher or lower. Then we land the helicopter - shut it down & the LAME makes
adjustments to all the nuts & bolts on the main rotor hub & the process is
repeated - sometimes for an agonising period.

Then ya go out & fly it - with the LAMe sitting in with ya - you then put it
into an autorotation & if the blades have been tracked successfully then the
main rotor RPM should stabilise at the max RPM red line.

So I suppose what I am trying to say is that if you experience a main rotor
overspeed then the maintenance of the machine is a bit of a worry. I still
have the bolt that was removed from the offending blade - it was cracked all
the way through - so it is really a very serious problem to experience a
main rotor overspeed.

see ya

Conscious Pilate

P.S. Your total logged time for about 3 hrs work is usually about 15mins!!