Plod, sorry, no insult intended, apologies. Shouldn't post post pub. There are an awful lot of wild and unconsidered theories flying about here which bear no resemblance to (what few) facts we know which is just clouding the water.
Unlikeliness does not equal impossible which is why I wrote "unlikely" instead of "impossible".
As I have stated before we were told the aircraft was transiting from a job back to base and it doesn't do that in the hover, so what speed do you suppose it would have been travelling at? Of course it might have transitioned to a hover to look at something it had spotted en route but again I suggest this is "unlikely" as they'd "probably" orbit first, but wouldn't they tell GLA APP which again we don't believe they did either. I would have done that in the similar aircraft I flew doing the same job...This leads me to believe the incident occurred in a transit - ie cruise speed. I can see no suggestion that it would be otherwise.
We all know what a fenestron failure can do in the hover but it's pretty hard to imagine a bird going through it in the cruise though there are other failure modes.
And as skadi said above there was no sign of bird remains visible, plus no sign of a high yaw rate upon arrival. That too tells us something.
Last edited by Agaricus bisporus; 5th Dec 2013 at 10:57.