This incident is surely the worst case scenario that any helicopter crew could experience. So far there has been very little advice offered on how you might survive such an event, presumably because few ever have. As an SAR pilot I have spent the majority of my career in high OGE hovers and TR failure was never far from mind. With that in mind I always took the opportunity during simulator currency trips to attempt to recover from a 300 feet OGE hover; the advice given which I tried to follow was- lower the collective, nose down for airspeed and roll into the turn then kill the engines if you could . The result was always a crash landing which was sometimes survivable. I know the sim is only as good as the engineer's model but for now it is the best we have but the one thing it cannot do is replicate the centrifugal force associated with the violent yaw experienced during a TR fail. Like Crab, I also knew and talked to the pilot involved in the Wessex incident and my stand out memory was him saying how hard it was to reach the speed select levers which were right next to the collective due to the spinning forces; more chilling was that I had delivered that airframe to Valley the week before and it could have been me.
Watching the video of this incident I would say that the pilot had cocked off to the left during the backup, as would be normal, and that the tail failure happens(if that is what happened) just as he kicks it straight prior to transition to forward flight. Is it possible that the two events are linked? I mention this because the Wessex incident happened during a tail rotor malfunction demo with an large pedal input used to simulate the malfunction.