I know you guys dont like it when people theorize about these crashes before an official report, but look, its what we do so may I?
Everything ive seen, and in particular the NTSB footage of the guy poking around the tail, suggests the tail rotor drive shaft bonds failed and cut the top of the tail boom open leading to loss of anti torque control, and an immediate yaw leading to loss of lift and low G resulting in the rotor being unloaded and the head hitting the mast and bending the mast at the transmission, ripping the entire lot out of the roof as a seperate event after the severing of the tail boom,
The pics of the inside of the tail boom show about 3-4 scratches where, after peeling that 20cm section open, the vibrating spinning driveshaft started whacking the split open piece of steel on its white side and only had a fraction of a second to work 3-4 lines of the white paint off.
Someone posted the video of the sound enhanced thing a few posts back, I think thats the sound of the TR driveshaft smacking around in its little cover.
Last edited by JeremyThompson; 20th April 2025 at 07:24.