Originally Posted by
Bell_ringer
My feeling is that the tail folding was secondary to the transmission, or mountings, letting go.
There were a couple of heli’s collided years ago and can be seen on those YouTube shorts where the main rotors collide and the first thing that happens is that the fuselage turns 90 degrees and the tail boom snaps straight off.
What I’m wondering is if it was a catastrophic transmission failure, would the blades keep spinning for an auto rotation, as once the blades and transmission left the fuselage, they were freely rotating with the transmission hanging below, so the transmission wasn’t seized? It’s not possible surely that the blades AND transmission were spinning through the air is it? (Thinking of a child’s toy here)
What about the engine, quite often in these events, something let’s go and the engine rpm goes through the roof; does anyone hear an engine in any of the videos? Mike Pateys turbine Lancair went from cruise RPM to zero in about a second, I fully expected that to at least tear the engine off the mounts or at least some torsional damage, but seemingly nothing.