Seafury:
Thanks for the heading... With that piece of info, my memory, Tiger Mate's and Oaksey's photographs and the information in
this post I think I have my orientation.
ShyTorque stated that they thought the aircraft was in a high hover and, upon experiencing the failure, attempted to move backwards back over the pads. Looking at Oaksey's and Tiger's pictures his theory doesn't make sense. The distances to trees are too great in all directions for a rearward drift to have ended up in the trees. The high hover makes some sense since it was a night takeoff but, unimpeded by trees, even without any automated stabilization I don't see the aircraft coming down any way other than properly oriented, (limited divergence in pitch and roll). I then find it difficult to see it killing everyone in these circumstances. Pax and ALM maybe, but the pilots would be comparatively well protected. I'm not saying it's impossible - it just seems unlikely.
Looking again at the photos and the post pointed to by Seafury it does seem more reasonable that the aircraft was in transition when the failure occurred. I speculate, (because I can't find any accident reports anywhere), that the aircraft had reached a high hover over the pad and had begun to transition, losing a little height as it did so and looking for the SSE speed. Oaksey's photo shows that the distance to the higher trees from the closest pad is only 70 or so yards which, with a fairly heavy a/c, would pretty much preclude it from having reached SSE speed. I'll further speculate, (and no - I wasn't a pilot - but I flew with one once...
), that once the failure occurred and it all went dark that the pilot would have a tendency to try to keep the collective high because he knew there were trees ahead making reattaining an Nr within limits very difficult. He didn't have a choice really... he's losing altitude with a massive shortage of power which, in an obstacle free environment, _might_ have been recoverable from. But the combination of a heavy aircraft, with a high density altitude, in transition, with limited power, high trees ahead and a thoroughly disorienting environment, (we all can remember how dark dark can be in Belize), conspired to make this an utterly unrecoverable situation.
Once the fuselage began to contact the trees it would add to any drag and serve to "pull" the aircraft down and once a tip or possibly the tail rotor struck something substantial it was all over. In the trees the aircraft would most certainly diverged in pitch, roll and yaw causing the much less survivable scenario that clearly occurred.
This gels more closely with those of us who remember, (some quite clearly), being under the canopy while "exploring" the wreckage and is all quite reasonable and logical remembering the way we used to operate.
I have made the diagram below to attempt to clear this all up and help others get better oriented.
The X and the Y are the approximate locations of Tiger_mate when he took his two pictures. The X is the picture of the Puma and was taken facing almost due west and the Y was the location of the second picture taken facing about 200 degrees hence his feeling that the crash site was behind him. Had Oaksey been there when Tiger took his picture he would have appeared in the first shot, within the rotor disk directly in front of the Puma. The crash site would be around the area of the large red circle. and the green line is the extent of the higher trees in the air photo provided by Seafury. Looking at the various pictures from the time and the air photo by Seafury it seems that the trees have neither encroached further nor been cut back much from their 1970/80's extent so the crash site is just out of shot on the left side of Seafury's air photo just below where the two tracks come together and, in Oaksey's photo it would have been in the region of the bushy treetop directly above where the track disappears.
As I have said several times, this is my "best guess", based on memories, other people's observations, a recollection of how we operated and what therefore seems logical and reasonable. I'm absolutely open to correction.