Originally Posted by
Pilot DAR
Recovering the transmission will be critical to the investigation. I imagine that the blades themselves would be "low density" because of the honeycomb construction, but the grips, head, mast and transmission would certainly be heavy enough to sink the assembly.
Had an event on a Bell 412 where it lost the tail rotor and t/r gearbox in flight over the Gulf (no injuries). An extensive search was conducted for the missing assembly with no luck, so Bell took another similar assembly with an added pinger and dropped it in the area. Turns out the assembly was only slightly negatively buoyant. The assembly was track drifting along the bottom in the current. The incident hardware was never recovered.
Fingers crossed this is not the case here.