Originally Posted by
RVDT
or NOT.
Unless of course you know more than the NTSB.
The Bell 206 accident in Hawaii is far from explained by the NTSB. They only say that they pulled the thing out of the water and all of the big structural pieces are accounted for.
Luckily there is video evidence of the last few seconds of the flight. This video shows a fairly shallow approach that suddenly gets interrupted. The video contradicts the pilot's statements that he initiated an autorotation to include a left pedal turn to land parallel to the shoreline. That simply did not happen. The videographer's statement was that the helicopter was coming in low and straight. Doesn't sound autorotative to me...
What we can see AND HEAR is the end of a fairly shallow approach. All of a sudden the ship plummets out of the sky, accompanied by the very clear sound of the tail rotor rpm *increasing* as the 206B's notoriously slow N2 governor, taken quite by surprise hadn't yet caught up with the lack of load. And there was a slight left yaw which would also be expected. This can ONLY be caused by one thing: Main driveshaft failure.
No matter what the pilot *says* happened, he's wrong. We always get it wrong. Whether he's being deliberately dishonest or just remembers things wrong doesn't really matter. I'd guess that it all happened too fast for his puny brain to comprehend, and felt that he had to immediately come up with an explanation of why he crashed. CYA? Why not just shrug and say, "I dunno, I don't remember. I'll get back to you when my memory of the event is more clear."
So don't think that the NTSB has ruled on that one yet.