Stringfellow,
It is a possibility and the two that I know of were violent rolls right over. Each time there was an instructor on board who was able to power up and land. I just missed seeing one such event by about ten seconds. I don't know what their recovery technique was and I feel that the one I saw had forgotten by the time he landed, for which I don't blame him at all.
In that case the engine oil blew out all over the place and was all over the tail boom when it landed.
Certainly one must keep an open mind. As a previous F/W instructor he would have known that he had to act in some way and had he not been taught the procedure of entering auto from a sudden engine failure then he could react incorrectly as others have.
His flight training Records might be a good place to start.
Of course there is other stuff to promote the theory. No fire on impact, which if there was any large quantity of fuel on board with that sort of impact is very likely to burn, meaning he may have experienced fuel starvation for a variety of reasons to stop his engine.
The smoke can be explained by oil being blown out of the engine only if it was running.
Perhaps if they were the new type of belts and they broke it “might?” be heard from the ground.
Had the belts broken suddenly and being inexperienced in R/W he may have been confused by the noise of the engine over revving but delivering no power, and to recover from an inverted position without power and the RRPM decaying badly might well be difficult, I don’t think anyone would know.
I think it easy to believe that a roll inverted with no power applied immediately would show as a blade strike on the aircraft somewhere, unless he then did suffer a severe mast bump which allowed the head and blades to fall seperately.
A sad conundrum for sure
tet