>>1789835To finish up,
3) Neither design will save you in a serious crash, but as a tractor is inherently heavier because the engine is further away from the pilot and the rotor mast, it's likely that the airframe is beefier. The pusher airframe can be made extremely simple and light to get excellent performance at a low price, but at the cost of crash safety.
After all that I am not saying that pusher designs are too dangerous, just that for better or worse they were made popular by excellent pilot/engineers that wanted good performance, knew how to fly and respected their machines. In the hands of unprepared beginners they may be fatal, but igor bensen flew his autogyros yet only died from parkinson at the age of 82, while commander ken wallis (of 007 "little nellie" fame) could still show how it's done in his 90's!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYQoGtvu5_YBesides, what's really important is to keep that rotor spinning, and neither design gives a perfect answer to that problem. The easiest thing to do is to make the rotor blades heavier so they won't slow down easily, but the real trick would be having a way to spin up the rotor in flight if it slows down to dangerous levels. You can't simply activate the pre-rotator in flight, as if it had enough power it would make the gyro spin out of control like an helicopter without it's tail rotor (it would work if you had coaxial rotors though). Another option would be too add tip rockets to the rotor to make it spin in an emergency, but that would be too situational. The best way is probably to store energy in a flywheel so that there's no adverse torque on the gyro when it engages to restore rotor rpm, but there's nothing like that available.
