Shy:
Sorry. I took the phrases "on take-off" and "the aircraft drifted back beyond the pad" to mean that you thought they had not yet begun to transition. I interpolated a "high" hover since it was a night take-off towards trees so the initial lift tended to be higher than the standard 10 to 15 feet and may have been as high as 50.
The point I was making is that I didn't believe the crash site was where the memorial is today as someone had stated. For it to have crashed there, bearing in mind the now known location of the landing pads, would have meant that it would have, most probably, experienced the failure in the hover over the pads.
Again, sorry. My "twisting" of your words was an innocent interpolation.