It is, but having had the fortune/misfortune (depends on your perspective!) of experiencing a couple of near-death experiences, the final seconds may well have been characterised by a sense of calm resignation.

This grabbed my attention. Assuming they started the maneuver in the hover which will already put some pressure on RRPM, do you think it would be possible that the aft cyclic to regain RRPM combined with potentially even lower RRPM might be sufficient to hit the Tail boom?

Interesting that a large left pedal input should give a roll to the right - in normal powered forward flight you would expect left yaw to give roll in the same direction as the disc flaps back.

My only thought is that the TR must be above the C of G - much as happens with mast bumping on a pushover - that fits with an entry to auto, when lowering the lever should give a nose down attitude if not corrected with aft cyclic.

As a number of Robbie accidents have shown - nose down with the TR producing a lot of thrust gives a nasty roll and compromises the MR to tail boom clearances.

I can't speculate how close the tail rotor was to the boom in my case, all i know is that there were no signs of undue contact on the flapping stops in the main rotor hub afterwards. As a layperson, wouldn't rule out that it could happen either, with the rotor RPM this far out the normal range, i'm sure a lot of things can change quickly.

Maybe it was a Overspeed condition. If they had a governor failure or such during high power demand and it got away from them and resulted in a overspeed. Or undetected damage from previous unreported overspeeds.
It's in Robinson Safety Notice SN-36:

"Helicopters have been severely damaged by RPM overspeeds during liftoff. The overspeeds caused a tail rotor drive shaft vibration which led to immediate failure of shaft and tailcone. Throughout the normal RPM range,
tail rotor shaft vibration is controlled by damper bearing. However, damper is not effective above 120% RPM"

I'm doubting the main rotor blades went through the tailboom cutting off the tail assembly and continued as it did in the video without near-instant failure, as it did when the observed tailboom strike occurred.

I believe all Cadets come with an EMU that tracks rotor and engine and rotor RPM and thus acts as a tattle tale for over speeds.

In that case the exceedances would also be recorded in the EMU.

There is no way however that a pilot, let alone an experienced instructor, could miss a RRPM excursion of more the 3 or 4%. And it is easy to correct (manual throttle override).

The scenario the Robinson Safety Notice relates to is where you are on the ground, with RRPM sitting at 100%, and governor inadvertently OFF. When now pulling collective to lift-off, the correlator will open the throttle (increase RRPM) unchecked by the governor.

Appreciate the answers. Agree the RPM rise would be caught and acted upon immediately.

Terrible event for those involved, but extraordinarily lucky for the people in town that it fell into a vacant lot beside buildings & roads! Very easily could have been collateral damage.

How experienced do you get in less than 2 months?

Sure. I see the investigation focuses on the human factors (new instructor vs old fix wing pilot).

Maybe I should have said “let alone an experienced pilot”. What I am saying is that the hawkish fixation on even small variations of the RRPM (that you listen out for at all times) is not an “instructor thing” but a pilot thing.

If I am not (again) mistaken, the contention is that the the PIC was a newly minted *instructor*, despite having considerable experience on type as a commercial pilot.

FYI: She had been on a fire helitack crew until 2021 when she quit to pursue a helicopter pilot career. She obtained her commercial on 3/19/2021 and her CFI 1/28/2022. Its my understanding her commercial experience was limited to this same company she worked for at the time of the incident. Her intention was to return to fires as a pilot.

In my early career as a flight instructor I had 2 cases of what could easily been ending up like in the video. Both cases I was low time(around 500hrs, most on type), R22 and the students were both fixed wing. Got to see RRpm of 90% and dropping before I managed to gain control. Both times ended in an early afternoon…..!

Over 20 years ago a very experienced instructor with circa 10K hours on Robbies was killed teaching a FW pilot autos and PFLs - what chance would a brand new instructor have?

My ppl instructor was a former corporate jet pilot. I was his first helicopter student and we both made it through my training unscathed.

,...and he used to chop the throttle on me all the time.

How thick a person's logbook is doesn't seem to guarantee anything in this industry.

Some people have also played Russian roulette and lived, but that doesn't make it a safe sport either.

Point is, during instructional flights, there is a high chance of erratic control inputs. That chance is higher when there is a fixed wing pilot involved, whose instinctual reaction, for example to a low rotor RPM horn, is extremely dangerous in a helicopter. Helicopters in general are not overly tolerant of erratic inputs, some less so than others. An inexperienced instructor is less likely to see these type of situations coming, and also will have less chance of recovering from the resulting mess, on account of being more surprised by it.

​​​​​​I've trained many fixed wing conversion pilots, and every single one i can remember, tried to shove the cyclic forward hard on me at least once when they heard the horn, despite being explicitly briefed on this beforehand. That's just one example. The hard left pedal scenario i described above, both happened to me when I already had a few thousand hours of dual instruction hours - i can't know if i would've survived them, had it been my first week of teaching. I am certain my chances wouldn't have been as good.

One thing I learnt as an instructor was it’s your good students you don’t trust. The less able students naturally have you more on guard. I had more than one close call because a students excellent performance lowered my guard and allowed me to be complacent. This typically was during manoeuvres the student was competent in and not the target training item.

One time I was conducting limited power run on training in a R22. The student was a high hour fixed wing pilot and an all around excellent and fast learning capable student. While running the 22 on at let’s say 10 knot with simulated engine limitation he proceeded to pull full aft cyclic. I was fighting him on the cyclic with limited effect and yelling I have control, release the controls etc to which he not responding and we had a LOT of aft cyclic while on the ground.
I have no idea how the blade did not hit the tail boom and shut down the aircraft to do a visual inspection just in case. Luckily no harm done just a good dose of adrenaline

He was a floatplane pilot and on debrief it turned out when landing a float place they use full aft stick to keep the nose from dipping. In fact his reaction was complete muscle memory and he did not realise that he was applying aft cyclic. As for not releasing the controls his brain processed those commands slower than expected for both of us. Let’s just say he was focused on a demanding manoeuvre (for a student) and was task saturated.

He went on to perform almost perfectly at almost all CPL lessons.


Don’t trust the good students, they will still make silly mistakes contrary to all prior performance. A Robbie just amplifies these especially a 22.

SLFMS, you make a very good point, as does Robbiee about the thickness of log books. The best story I've heard along both lines was an experienced USAF instructor F-16 pilot getting his first GA checkout in a Cherokee, doing an approach just prior to touchdown the check pilot asked the F-16 chap to go around, and he did, full forward with the left hand and full back with the right, as you would in an F-16. Trouble is, in a Cherokee your left hand is on the yoke and right hand on the throttle. Aircraft bent.

SLFMS - absolutely correct - we always taught new instructors in the military that it was the good student who would try and kill you.

Task saturation and over confidence can quickly reach the cliff edge of the student's ability and they may have already taken you further into a hazardous condition than you were expecting.