I'm pretty much with you too M'hale as you would have seen. I'd be thoroughly cross examining historical flights pilots.
I checked the local WX but from here can't seem to go back further than the 1st but the photograph of the foliage and WX trends show nothing our of the ordinary at all, 5 to 10 knots fair etc.
I don't believe that a mast bump has to take out the tail boom and I agree with Blakmax that a bad flight condition on one blade could have imparted strong enough forces to cause the mast bump. Against that the eyewitness should have also said something like this, "even though we were seeing it what really got my attention was a really increasing swishing sound before the thing flew off"
The witness also said it "flew up" indicating an aerodynamic stability of some sort of the rotors, which wouldn't be the case with a major debond I don't think.
We had a '47 once with a mast cracked severely. It exhibited a very strong vibration and was cracked a third of the way around and nearly 1/8 inches wide at center of it.We put that down to constant over controlling, little or no corrosion evident from memory. The A/C was fitted with a no bar kit and the crack was just under the mast rod end clamps.
So I guess I am getting around to saying that if there was a pre-existing crack that it should have exhibited some form of vibe, but then again it could well have been very early stages. Another issue is the proximity of the ocean and whether there may have been advanced corrosion.
Certainly one blade off I think would take out either or both cab and tail boom in collateral damage.
The Aussie air force 205's from memory with their mast bumps years ago didn't have collateral damage, I could be wrong there.I used to know one of the eye witnesses to the second one and he didn't mention it.
Dennis, believe me you will need weightlessness to do damage; any sort of violent control inputs whilst you have positive pendular weight will just force the A/C to just follow the cyclic. A mate of mine and I were chewing this last night, his words were, 'You would have to think that after all the hundreds of thousands of hours of mug pilots and good mustering drivers that a simple problem like over controlling would have shown up yonks ago.'
Finally I will devoutly say that these things are not flimsy. Some of the components over the years have had their faults, the flimsy stainless steel skin on those blades being one, but they were only flimsy when idiots ran into things, quite solid enough to fly with and do all sorts of hard maneuvers with. Perhaps your engineer mate VF is talking about A/C that are flown over hours, if so it's non valid argument. Very many are over flown for sure.
These R22 A/C have had many beef up mods, 90% of which I am reliably informed emanate from North Queensland where they were consistently overflown.
So, Frank now has an aircraft design far superior than is needed should people fly according the 100 hour and AFM book.Lots of the blades failures have been shown to have just simply been so overweight so often that it is bleeding obvious someone will get hurt.
I've tried to hurt them often and toughest ride I have had for a long while was today, 42 degrees outside the moo cows being particularly not fond of such heat and some bloody cane toad had crawled into the machine some days ago while it sat outside with doors on, stink that bastard.
cheers tet
Last edited by topendtorque; 4th Dec 2012 at 11:54.