Poor guy is lost. Who the heck was his instructor in Texas.
As I suspected the more steps you put in the takeoff process, rotor RPM to this first, then stick halfway back and then this and then stick there and then this and that ... the more you are going to waste precious runway and the more these transitioning lower time airplane pilots are going to stuff up takeoffs.
Uhmm, OK, nice strawman there. If the flexshaft prerotator autogyros were commonly afflicted with blade sailing, you might have had something there. But such is not the case, no, not at all.
At some point we have to look at the stats and say, our pre-rotators today can take you straight to 180 to 230 rotor RPM. There is a rotor RPM gauge in every modern gyroplane. None of this go to this rotor RPM, do this and then go to that rotor RPM and do that. Just go to 180 to 230 rotor RPM, stick all the way back smoothly as you advance throttle smoothly, takeoff. Done. Climb out at Vx or Vy
While any autogyro can be blade sailed, the flat disc 200 rotor RPM spool up drive-shafted prerotators simply have a higher incidence of it. Few RAFs and Sparrowhawks have experienced blade sailing, but such are rather common in the Calidus, for example. Among new pilots transitioning from FW, it's just not as predictable as your:
"Just go to 180 to 230 rotor RPM, stick all the way back smoothly as you advance throttle smoothly, takeoff. Done. Climb out at Vx or Vy."
That all works splendidly...
when the new pilot
remembers to move the stick back before the roll. They too often do not remember to do so.
I've never found the progressive aft stick with rotor RPM any tricky procedure, and certainly not an inherently risky one. By the time the stick is full back at 120+ (and one is still prerotating from there to 200) the risk has mostly dissipated as a take-off roll commencing with aft stick will further spool up the rotor. (This is not liberty to go to full power <200.) Also, the progressive aft stick in conjunction with increasing rotor RPMs I believe instills more appreciation for the throttle : prerotation relationship, and thus helps to teach rotor management.
I do not understand why such a big gyro with a huge engine like Sparrowhawk can only get rotor RPM to 120 though. I think what they say is at 120 pull stick all the way back while keeping pre-rotator engaged like the Magni. He decided not to do that.
And I do not understand where you have gotten that idea of 120 as a maximum. 200 is easy to achieve in a Sparrowhawk if the prerotator is properly maintained, and its POH explicitly calls for 200:
I'd like to know what he thinks was "adequate" for rrpm.
I'll warrant that he 1) doesn't actually have a number for that, and 2) still has no real idea what his rrpm was when he crashed.
The fact that he told us that, the moment before the crash, he pulled the stick back (when the stick should have already been almost all the way back during the entire roll) when he reached his "rotation speed" (he never says what speed he thought that is/was), says it all, IMO.
Yes, good ear. He was not following POH procedure at all. No autogyro should be "rotated" like that. The pilot in his interview seemed vague and sloppy. He was indeed fortunate to emerge alive and relatively uninjured. I hope he scrupulously realises what he did incorrectly that day.