SASless, I'll offer a response to your musing:
The extremely short time period in which to sort his problem out (since we can probably go to the bank with the pilot being faced with a sudden and catastrophic failure of some sort that precluded any precautionary (versus forced) landing) ... combined with the flight being at night over an urban area ... would make picking up all of the visual cues for the desired forced landing in what the pilot would intend to be a place "where people aren't" a real bugger. Flying over urban area, someone with his experience would doubtless be aware of there being a lot of wires, poles, and all sorts of obstructions as we get near the ground. Finding a decent spot is by itself a bit of a challenge. In the back of the mind is the intent to avoid getting to the bottom, pulling, and having the main rotor blade hit something (like the side of a building) and turning a forced landing into something far worse in the middle of the flare/pull.
As each second ticks by, the number of options for "spot to put this machine down" shrink rapidly.
If, as some contributors have suggested, he did not have as much NR as he'd have liked, this challenging scenario gets an added degree of difficulty from an RoD higher than one might be used to from from practicing an autorotative descent on training flights.
Add to that the possibility that the helicopter swapped ends a few times (that's one read on the witness reports of "helicopter tumbling" "going end over end" ), coupled with a bit less control authority than one is used to (if NR was significantly low, then control inputs could well be less responsive than one's feel would be used to) ... and you end up with a nightmare scenario for any helicopter pilot.
If my guess on how the end game played out is right, he damn near managed it.
Last edited by Lonewolf_50; 5th Dec 2013 at 21:54.