It’s by no means the first time a helicopter pilot has attempted a forward transition without having sufficient power and it probably won’t be the last.
Seeing that reminded me of when I first began flying a police helicopter (now well over twenty five years ago) at a newly formed unit. I was tasked to take a seriously injured road accident casualty to hospital, on a stretcher. He had stepped out from behind a bus and been hit by a car. In order to get a stretcher in the aircraft we had to remove the left side front seat and leave one observer behind. It wouldn’t normally have been a problem but the casualty was a very large man; possibly weighing well over 300 lbs and it was a struggle to even get him on board. The landing site was on a narrow, elevated stretch of road above grass fields, with tall street lamps on either side (possibly 30’ high) and there was no option but to carry out an initial vertical climb to clear them. It took three attempts to get high enough to clear the street lamps and even then I was grateful that the road was elevated because I had to “swoop” the aircraft down to get any airspeed. Landing the aircraft at the hospital was just as much “fun”, but at least a bit of fuel had been burned off by the time we got there.