PPRuNe Forums - UH-60 forced landing/crash, golf course, Maryland

Quote:

"About 1 o'clock we had a Black Hawk helicopter come over and he was kind of flying sideways, pretty low, and then as we got out on the deck watching it, he got treetop level and all of a sudden we saw the tail spin up and just spinning around and we heard him go down," witness Mike Harvey, a golf professional at Breton Bay Golf Course, told WBAL News Radio 1090 AM.

This description (about the helicopter spinning) points toward something being amiss with perhaps the:
tail rotor
tail rotor gear box
tail rotor drive shaft
intermediate gear box.

From the pictures, and other eyewitness accounts, this was a very hard landing. The rotor blades appear to have hit a tree, and this aircraft is most likely a write off.

Besides the one fatality, the other two crew were taken to a hospital with non-trivial injuries.