Oh, Doubting Thomas... I was not there to witness it, but I would never doubt my friend Greg's truthfulness or sincerity in telling me about the sim session. And if it's true that he was the first S-76 sim pilot to survive the dual engine-failure scenario then I, as an experienced helicopter pilot have to make a couple of educated guesses. That's exactly that they are, and that's exactly how I qualified them.
While I've never flown the S-76, I do know how quickly the RRPM decays in other helicopters if you do nothing but lower the collective after an engine failure at cruise. It takes aft cyclic to bring the RPM back, and sometimes a lot of it. If you're starting from 500 feet that doesn't leave you much room or time. While you're working to get everything under control and get into a stabilized auto, you're losing altitude and your choice of landing spots is getting smaller and smaller.
So I won't go as far as to swear on a stack of Bibles in a courtroom as to why my buddy was the first pilot to pull it off and the other presumably good, competent pilots crashed, but it doesn't take a scientist of rocketry to figure it out. All I'm saying is that those of us who actually know how to fly a helicopter flies...as opposed to, say, you... we understand what Pete Gillies was trying to convey to us.
And HC, it's true, the guys who actually crashed the real one had a lot of things working against them. That other pilots in the relatively sanitary conditions of a simulator also crashed is telling...at least to me...and probably to them as well.