Posted on 08/02/2015 6:42:12 PM PDT by Crystal Palace East
See video at link
Obvious tail rotor failure.
Watch closely at :07. Looks like flare fails to fully eject near starboard forward area of a/c. Possibly then hit tail rotor.
At 1:02 of link you posted, you can see other crewman escaping a/c!!!!!!
INCREDIBLE VIDEO.
he was definitely falling out of the sky fast, didn’t appear to attempt to cushion the impact.w
Brave men. They tried to control it all the way to the ground. Avoid hitting the civilians on the ground.
Can you turn up power on the engine w/o a tail rotor?
I saw it differently.
Unreal video
Actually this was a pretty well-controlled crash. Not much you can do but yank on the collective to slow the fall and try to keep it level with the cyclic.
Not a good idea. Autorotation flare is proper procedure
Later
The key to survival in case of loss of tail rotor thrust is airspeed. If you have sufficient airspeed then either a running landing or autorotation is possible.
This A/C appears to have lost airspeed while performing that aerobatic maneuver. Adding collective pitch would have increased torque spin & further loss of control.
They probably tried to pull all the pitch they had left prior to impact. Sad situation.
Autorotations I’ve been in the pilot dropped the nose to build forward airspeed then flare close to the ground .....or .....slide in fixed wing style on the skids etc.. Didn’t look like this pilot had the altitude to try either..
How do you flare with no airspeed?
In this case an out of ground effect hover has the highest anti-torque requirement. The high performance maneuver would most likely add to that.
The interesting thing I saw was just prior to the loss of control you see the aircraft rotate slightly nose right and stop then begin nose left rotation that never stops. I don't know if there was a failure right at that point or whether he ran out of right pedal. Once the rotation starts you need a lot more anti-torque because you are dealing with not only the current torque requirement, but also the rate that has already built up. Almost all bad things in helicopters are first countered by reducing collective. Reducing collective reduces torque to the rotor system, thereby giving more pedal authority.
In this instance the best chance of stopping the yaw rate would have been to dump the collective and pitch the nose down to attempt to fly out of it. Hard to tell the max altitude, but that might not have been successful either. a tail rotor malfunction (if that's what it was) in forward flight sucks, but would most likely still be recoverable.
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