Fox on YouTube and ring cam caught it going down.

2 fatalities

https://youtu.be/-wWPcs5i164

https://youtu.be/wIqZ7cHnU24

Looks like he drove it straight into the ground.

Prayers for the crew.

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:
Looks like he drove it straight into the ground.

That's not at all what I'm seeing. It looks like they'd lost control completely. Maybe catastrophic mechanical issue. I see wildly spinning and pitching. Nothing to indicate intentionally driving it into the ground.

Prayers out.

A bit more info on how it was flying here and maybe they managed to get it away from a subdivision. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U7DgX665F8
Very sad. - appears to be TN National Guard

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:
Looks like he drove it straight into the ground.

^(searching for the word intentionally?)

Damn!

RMD

quote:

Originally posted by r0gue:

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:
Looks like he drove it straight into the ground.

That's not at all what I'm seeing. It looks like they'd lost control completely. Maybe catastrophic mechanical issue. I see wildly spinning and pitching. Nothing to indicate intentionally driving it into the ground.

You are correct. Watched a different video that shows it better and it appears that he did lose tail rotor authority.

quote:

Originally posted by cas:

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:
Looks like he drove it straight into the ground.

^(searching for the word intentionally?)

"Intentionally" would be inferred by using "he drove it".


Rick

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:

quote:

Originally posted by r0gue:

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:
Looks like he drove it straight into the ground.

That's not at all what I'm seeing. It looks like they'd lost control completely. Maybe catastrophic mechanical issue. I see wildly spinning and pitching. Nothing to indicate intentionally driving it into the ground.

You are correct. Watched a different video that shows it better and it appears that he did lose tail rotor authority.

Agreed, and the most likely explanation.

Another thought that crossed my mind was the pilot became disoriented in IFR conditions.
The videos I've seen show him popping out from the clouds already out of control (almost looked inverted).

quote:

Originally posted by Oz_Shadow:
and maybe they managed to get it away from a subdivision.

It always impresses me how pilots, faced with imminent loss of craft, and probably life manage to think about minimizing damage to those on the ground by performing last minute maneuvers to miss occupied structures.

Obviously, we will never know what was going through the pilot's mind when he realized that the air was no longer supporting him, but it appears that he found the wherewithal to do the right thing.

Hard to tell from the one video. Any chance he was trying for an autorotation and ran out of time.

I could see a tiny black spec falling from the sky is all. Seemed like it was falling like a rock. Very sad . Prayers for the crews families. Thank you crew. May you RIP now.

another video

https://twitter.com/i/status/1625990307807657984

IIRC, there were some "teething" problems early in the Blackhawk's service, where the horizontal stabilizer would pitch down in forward flight, causing node-dives, loss of control, etc. The horizontal stabilizer is usually only in a pitched-down state when landing vertical or near vertical. I don't remember if is was a hardware or software issue that caused the problem. The video I saw showed the Blackhawk in a nose-down attitude, hence my theorizing. RIP and prayers for the families.