The theoretical discussions of whether this pilot was inside or outside of the H-V curve are humorous. I guess some of you have no real idea of how fast the rotor rpm goes away when the engine burps for real.
August in Muncie, Indiana, 3:00 in the afternoon. You *know* it had to be hot, whew! Probably little or no wind. The pilot is wearing a helmet. In that heat? Good for him, but oh man I'm sure he had to be fatigued, especially if he'd been in that thing all day long hopping rides.
"That thing" is a G-2, so it should have had good power unless it was sick, which in retrospect it may have been. Nevertheless, it doesn't exactly leap off the ground. The pilot picks up, departs and almost immediately turns 180. He was not much higher than the trees. One loud *pop* later (maybe two), you can actually see the rotor rpm going away and the blades coning. The guy never even put the pitch down. Or flared, evidently, because as he descended behind that tree I could discern no pitch-attitude change and he must've been down to 25 feet by then. All that open farmland and he couldn't do a "simple" straight-ahead auto.
At least, it should have been simple from that altitude: Collective down...flare...level...collective back up. All in about the time it takes to say it. He would have had to accept some run-on in that heat and no-wind condition, but oh well.
I know, I know, "the pilot says" he entered autorotation blah blah blah. I don't buy it. It all happened too fast when he was too low and too slow. We all think that we're going to have the reaction time and precision of Chuck Yeager or Nick Lappos. But the truth is that we normal humans sometimes don't have lightning reflexes. Sometimes it takes half a mo' for things to sink in, but we only have a quarter of a mo' or an eighth of a mo' to do something about them.
Which is why it is good to *not* climb out at 45 mph at 50 feet just because the book says that a sharp-dressed test pilot with a pencil-thin mustache was able to do a planned autorotation from a point on an X-Y graph that was a whole big friggin' 6 mph less. Which is why it is good to not do anything (like make any turns) when you have the collective up by your left pants pocket until you have good altitude and airspeed...and by "good" I mean "sufficiently in excess of the minimums called out in the RFM." Which is why you say to yourself, "The engine is going to quit on THIS takeoff" and you do so because: a) you believe it; and b) one day you'll be right. I have been flying for a long, long time and I still say it prior to every takeoff. Every one.
When you cross that nebulous line between Ops-Normal and Gone-Pearshaped, things start happening very fast. Trouble is, we human pilots don't always anticipate the crossing of that line, nor do we always see it as it speeds past us.