Originally Posted by
The Sultan
It looks in the video like the boom and fin are attached. If the tailboom had separated the ship would flip not spin in relatively level attitude. So loss of tail rotor thrust for whatever reason seems obvious. As the 505 has a well proven drivetrain design error can be excluded. This leaves maintenance error, FOD or bird strike as probable causes.
If you read the media coming out around the event, “officials” say there was no wire strike
because there was no power outage in the area. That seems to be a weak argument for no wirestrike. Many support wires exist in the world that would take a rotor strike and it wouldn’t be obvious without further investigation. The crash video appears to me like Some kind of external impact removed major components and led to complete loss of control. Could be an animal, vegetable or mineral.