Original Message

The part of the auto that does the most to protect you and the machine really happens between the failure and 15 to 25 feet above the touchdown point. All failures don't happen over terrain that makes a damage free touchdown possible. Even with perfect area selection, the side of steep terrain, or rough terrain, or wooded terrain may be the best we can do. If we end up at the point of decelaration and initial pitch pull in control, with little forward speed, and a reasonable rate of descent we may sacrafice the aircraft but not ourselves. 

Practice touchdown autos are a wonderful traing tool, if for nothing else, to build pilot confidence that, dependent on touchdown area, autorotations are'nt really all that scary. There obviously is potential to damage the aircraft while practing completing a landing following a relatively rare, ie. engine, failure. The military stopped doing full down autos in training, except for initial training, because the threat of engine failure didn't warrant the exposure to training accidents.

I would rather conduct recurrent training with full downs but I can certainly understand companies looking at the statistics of actual engine failures and concluding that traing should concentrate on safely getting the aircraft to the point of decelaration and pass up the full touchdown.