FW pilots when faced with an engine fail in the cruise will inevitably push forward to retain speed rather than flare.
I have bugger all in F/W, only singles and less than 3K. Their cruise speed is usually a fair bit more than best range glide speed. What I was taught was to pull up for more height if possible. I discarded that later and simply adopted a technique off bleeding off airspeed until the best range speed appeared and trimmed it at that attitude. I figured much less energy waste, whether I was turning to a spot or not. Don't forget this gentleman was a F/W instructor.
Re the bird evasion that is possible I suppose, but i personally think it very unlikely that he would have suffered a serious mast bump by simply pushing forward on the cyclic even with down collective.
Don't forget serious mast bumps are often coupled to blades going way out of whack and severing the tail boom and or the cabin, which did not happen.
The smoke was not a fuel fire or it would have been burning on the ground.
Oil could have been ingested from a ruptured xmon through the cooling fan and blown over the exhaust, mucho smoke! Or spilt on the exhaust from an engine rupture. Or it could come from the belts. These new belts don't seem to smoke before failure, they just break as far as I know.
The old belts will smoke but not for long before failure, say a few seconds, i think it unlikely to be seen from the ground, just a hunch.
I can't presume he didn't lower the lever after a simple belt or engine failure because the aricraft is inverted. In a rotor blade stall they nearly always land right way up with the blades acting a bit like a wind vane after they bend.
Also quite often before they bend properly they will strike the boom or the cabin.
I guess if the blades were the old variety and a few hundred hours old it is reason enough to suspect a delam causing a blade breakage, which fits nicely with a bang when it breaks and bits seen falling elsewhere, but once again why the smoke. Maybe that could have ruptured the xmon?
The blade delams on the R22 that I know about haven't failed because of it and make a very loud swishing noise which is absolutely unmistakeable, no comment about that either.
But then again I could be way out of whack with all of this.
I would dearly like to see a photograph from the other side.