What happened to the aircraft below had happened at least 3 times previously, but after thinking about it I don’t know that a worse failure(losing more surface area of the blade) would be the cause of this most recent incident. It seems like this would most likely result in the aircraft breaking up in flight.
I think responding to a stabilator failing out of auto mode improperly as others have suggested could have caused something like this. New York national guard had a crash caused during a checkride where the instructor pilot manually slewed the stabilator down in cruise flight while simultaneously silencing the master caution(at night under NVGs as well) The pilot on the controls didn’t have time
to react to the failure.
There was also an accident in Maryland a few years ago where the entire tail rotor gearbox separated from the aircraft due to vibration from a failed tail rotor blade. The emergency procedure that came out of that one is optimistic to say the least.
Most accidents seem to come down to human factors, lessons can be learned and applied and I still feel
confident in the aircraft as a platform. Honestly, this one is getting to me because at this (very early) point it just looks like the aircraft killed them.
60mech