perfrej, it actually takes a serious "lack" of tail rotor thrust to spin a 412 at cruise speed. In the case that I am thinking of a piece of the t/r blade came off, shortly followed by the entire blade. Our sim trg previous to that had taught us that we could fly out of this situation as you also suggest. Alas, as the two pilots learned, this was not true in most conditions. They died, but the crew in the cabin survived due to their attempt to crash level. Don't trust the behaviour of a simulator in emergencies such as this and don't make up new techniques because they work in the simulator. Its been said before, but a sim is only as good as its flight model, and until this crash there wasn't a lot of useable flight data on 412 tail rotor failures.
That being said, I just finished my annual sim trg in a level C sim and I wouldn't give that up for the world.