Difference between a Fairy Tale and a War Story......one begins "Once upon a time...." and the other starts "Now this is no sh........... or There I was fat, dumb, and happy....".
Combat can add a lot of opportunities for you to have a story or two that despite being seen as being beer talk....are quite true and may have happened even it not to the story teller who is borrowing said story.
The real stories rarely are told as they strike deep within the heart of the teller all these years later.
I like the ones that are told by ther crew members were in the back of the bus .....that are told during reunions that remind you of those events.....but seen from a different perspective.
Stories like the one that kicked off this thread are of great value as accounts of events where Pilots have little training for (if any is possible) and how they managed to survive the situation.
As usual...I remind folks that to be an aviator one must know Gann (Ernest Gann of "Fate Is The Hunter") and Bach (Richard Bach of "Stranger To The Ground) and their many Tomes about flying.
We can learn much from others and their experiences and should avail ourselves of every opportunity to do so.
That helps allow us to go out and learn from our own unusual days rather than merely copying previous near tragedies.
I only experienced a loss of flight controls twice....one being a Tail Rotor failure at a hover in the middle of an Airfield and a stuck collective on a Bell 206 on final approach to a bush operation camp site and had to use throttle to reduce RPM with the resulting loss of lift to get the aircraft down....landing on the makeshift helipad in the normal spot.
The Engineer watching the landing realized there was a problem of some kind and walked to the side of the aircraft...opened my door....and asked if there was a problem with the Collective....which seemed either he was clairvoyant or knew something I had figured out all by my lonesome.
New bits were taken from the storeroom shelf and installed before the next flight which suggested that sage individual could see into the future......as I could not believe only "luck" had miracles the parts onto that shelf inside the Spares Tent.
Reports of "Sticky" flight controls should be documented and investigated with the results made known is the lesson I gleaned from that event.
The use of throttle came from practice in UH-1's during my Army training while practicing tail rotor failures and using throttle to control the heading of the aircraft in the absence of tail rotor control or thrusl.