Don’t worry guys, in the onsets of the report, CNN said the seals blew up the chopper after it encountered “mechanical problems” and crushed on the compound leaving nothing to chance. Yes, that was the word in the early reports.
Besides, words in the street had suggested as early as spring of 2010 that them there ChiComs too are fiddling around with something similar therefore this supposedly highly classified chopper probably means nothing to them.
Anyway, the question that keeps popping in my mind is this: how differently is this new and supposedly super chopper from that of an UH-60 or an AH-60 if it is as unreliable, mechanically? Not very my opinion. I find the Black Hawk and the Apache way way cooler than this supposedly new and highly classified chopper.
Pretty sure this was just a “stealthed” Blackhawk, so the basic airframe would be the same. Maybe different engines, and certainly a different main rotor and bodywork.
It’s JMHO, and I’m not a pilot much less a helicopter pilot, but looking at the layout of the Laden compound, and the conjectural drawings of the helicopters, my guess is that the helo’s main rotor clipped the wall of the compound, causing the craft to go into a spin and crash. The reason for my guess is that some of the conjectural drawings show an extra, angled segment of the main rotor blades, presumably as part of the stealth design. If, in the excitement of the moment, the pilot missed a mental gearshift and thought he was in a regular Blackhawk, he might not have left himself enough clearance away from the compound wall, and clipped it with that extra length of rotor blade. Making the landing at night, lights-out, would only have complicated the issue, night-vision notwithstanding. Also, unless they did things very differently, I’m pretty sure the accident happened during the extraction, as commandos normally do an infiltration by roping from the chopper, which means it wouldn’t have needed to land. Exfiltration necessarily means landing, since it’s a lot harder to go up those ropes fast than it is to come down them, especially after a combat operation.