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If it looks like you are going to hit hard vertically, do not lean forward, but brace your back against the complete area of the seat to maintain a natural curvature. Spinal injuries are most often caused by flexing.
In fact, there are two broad types of injury to consider. Contact injuries arise when you hit something, or something hits you (such as loose articles in the cockpit). Decelerative injuries result purely from motion of the body, or loads applied through seats and safety belts. They are internal in nature, such as the spinal injuries mentioned above, or in the abdomen. Other injuries, like burning, may occur after the crash.
Although it helps to crash as slowly as possible, dissipation of whatever speed you have is the main consideration, and this is never usually uniform. Every obstacle the fuselage hits is responsible for a peak deceleration and the potential for damage to the people inside, so it makes sense to try and protect this as much as possible at the expense of rotors, undercarriage, tail booms, etc. This is where the proper use of shoulder straps is important – if you don't wear one, you will jackknife over your lapstrap and your head will hit the instrument panel at a speed over 12 times that of the cockpit deceleration. Also, when only wearing a lapstrap, your tolerance to forward deceleration reduces to below 25G, from a normal total of over 40.
Some things you can do to prevent injuries can be done before you get a problem, by selecting clear routes wherever possible, and flying higher, which increases your range of choices (but not so high that it takes too long to get down in a hurry).
Once you've landed:
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Close throttle & fuel valve
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Turn off Battery
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Evacuate aircraft
Power-On Recoveries
These are an increasing trend in many companies, intended to reduce the number of autorotative accidents when practicing engine-off landings, and ensuring that some pilots don't get to practice real ones for years on end. The examiner is looking for a correct entry into autorotation and flare initiation height, but, thereafter, the process is a coordination exercise, and you should treat it as a rather fast transition to the hover— be careful not to check and level, or you can expect a large torque spike (in a 206, anyway), and looking at the torquemeter is not what you want to be doing at that late stage.
Tail Rotor Failure
When the tail rotor fails, it will be in varying degrees of positive, neutral or negative pitch, depending on what you were doing at the time, so if you can remember what it was, you will have an idea of the state of the pedals. Unless it’s a drive failure, or you lose some of the components, the chances are that you won’t discover the problem until you change your power setting, as it’s very unlikely you’ll be flying along in the cruise, for instance, and find a pedal forcing itself completely over to one side, as simulated by instructors on test flights, unless you have a motoring servo or similar, in which case your problem is hydraulics and not the tail rotor, although the effect might be the same. More typically, you will be in a descent, climb, cruise or hover, with the pedals where they should be and won’t move when you want to do something else. When descending, for example, in the AS350, you will have more left pedal (more right in the Bell 206), both of which will aid the natural movement of the fuselage against the main rotors. The pedals would be in a neutral position if you were flying at medium to high speeds, and the power pedal would be forward in high-power situations, like hovering. In any case, the spread between the pedals is not likely to be more than a couple of inches either way, certainly in a 206 – try an autorotation properly trimmed out to see what I mean. You will notice the same in the hover. My point is that the situation may not be as bad as frequently painted.
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