I concur with Helipolarbear, one can only praise the Captain's sound judgement and skillful handling of the incident which resulted in no injuries to the occupants. A run on landing in excess of 60kts in a stricken helicopter vs controlled ditching? There is in my opinion no definitive answer to this question due to the number of variables involved. In this instance the Captain made the right call.
Sadly in Jan 02 a similar failure on a 365N2 in Nigeria ended tragically. The TR failure in that accident occured on short finals to a quayside helipad at the Brass oil terminal. Due to the low forward speed and stage of flight the helicopter immediately spun out of control hitting a barge on the river next to the helipad. Tragically both pilots and 2 pax were killed.
The picture of the hub assembly from that accident looks remarkably similar to this one, with the hub and blades completely detached from the damaged housing. The Nigerian accident report concluded that one blade failed due to a fatigue crack at the blade root resulting in catastophic damage to the remaining blades and a total loss of tailrotor effectiveness.
Subsequently Eurocopter reduced the time in service for the problem blades before they were replaced with a re-designed version some time later. All EC365N2s worldwide with this type of blade should have had the old blades replaced.
Did PK-TSX have the newer or older version of the blades?
Also more recently there was an incident in Norway involving a Dauphin with a vibration felt by the pilots shortly followed by a TR failure. Fortunately there were no injuries as the pilot was able to put the helicopter down safely.
Does anyone know if the report into that incident has been released yet?
Hopefully this latest incident will make Eurocopter re-examine the blades and rectify a problem that should have been fixed a long time ago.
One hopes it will happen before there are any more incidents or tragedies.