What happened appears to be the worst nightmare of a helicopter pilot except in my nightmare I’m at 3000 ft with a lot more time to think about the fall. A comparable airplane malfunction would be loss of both elevators and wings. As a fix wing and rotor wing pilot of 30 years I’ve had both nightmares. The question is, did the tail rotor and part of the the tail boom come off striking the main rotor snapping the mast or did the mast snap and the main rotor strike and sever off the tail boom. How would either happen? A lost of a pitch change link on either rotor would do it. A mast bump maybe but much less likely, I don’t think it’s a particularly bad problem in the Long Ranger. Could have been as simple as a passenger smacking the controls and over reaction of the pilot. Was simply amazing to see the rotor spinning like a pin wheel to earth, a sight I wish I might have seen without the loss of life involved.
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