Fatal firefighting UH-60 training accident in Florida

[JohnDixson]

I cannot find a small number of pics from that landing site at Ft Campbell, so the only picture I have at the moment of the downed ship, is the same one that is in the SA Archives link that you posted. I accompanied several others that arrived there the next morning ( the incident happened at 1130PM and we left CT at 0530. Anyway, we replaced the main and tail blades, borescoped the main box and were ready to ground run and fly it out
pretty quickly. Pacing item became getting the Army kids with chain saws to clear the hole in the woods that the ship had created. The ship was flown out by CWO Dick Seefeldt ( Maintenance Officer assigned to the Army team for the SA aircraft and one of the 10 Ft Campbell operational evaluation pilots. Went back into the competition immediately and that one eventually became the maintenance trainer ship at Ft Rucker.

Back to the Firehawk accident,SAS: You wrote:
”It could be the Snorkel "flew" and went up into the Main Rotor or it swung back into the Tail Rotor.
The length of the Snorkel will be a clue to that if it is too short to reach the Tail Rotor.”
You know, looking at the length of the snorkel in the video, your second sentence above might suggest that the very hard end of the snorlel swung up into the main rotor, which batted it back to the TR. The fitting on the end of the snorkel, with the velocity from the MR impact, added to the rotational velocity of the TR, could be very damaging indeed.
Something else worth looking into. i may have mentioned this before in other threads: I’ve no idea if this thought is still accurate to the newer models, but the original AFCS computer incorporated a history module, as after all, it had all the control position, attitude, etc sensors feeding it. The engineer who headed up that effort made sure that module went into the ship, even though the Army said they didn’t need it. Similarly, the T-700’s also had some history data built in. Neither of these functions were installed in separate crashworthy hardware, though.

Another possibility is that the swinging snorkel end hit one of the pushrods in the center. Now the pitch horns on this head are leading edge horns, meaning that a hypothetical hit by the business end of the snorkel in the center of a pushrod might result in a bent rod, which in turn would take that blade low. If the bend was enough, could that blade fly low enough to cut the tail? At first blush, seems improbable: those pushrods are built to take a 51cal bullet, etc, but just saying…….