Ugh. I hate that kind of odd failure. No real chance there unless it had happened like 10 or 15’ off the ground.
I mean, to me this feels like failure on part of maintenance. What factors exactly played into that(tired, pressured, stressed, bad conditions[lights, etc]), I wouldn’t know but… yeah…
Oh my. A tailrotor failure is one thing. Maybe…maybe even survivable if you dump the collective and get some forward airflow. But a tailrotor that goes full pitch on its own is simply unrecoverable. Nothing could be done behind the stick. I am not even sure a good mechanic could have prevented it. A pin and castellated nut? They tend took just like they always do until they don’t. Terrifying.
I wonder if a device could be made that would sense that condition and given other parameters, like rotation speed, descent rate, and tail rotor blade angle, that there could be some sort of auto-centering force applied? I suppose that it would need to be completely redundant to the original control mechanism.
What needs to be done is immediately obvious to a pilot (I would guess). So no automated system would help. In this case, it was a simple but catastrophic mechanical failure. The computer would be just as helpless as the human.
After rereading I see what you were getting at. Still, I think layers of protection bring further layers of risk as each layer is itself a system subject to failure.
Yeah, that’s why I said completely redundant, but I’m probably looking past some other mechanical limitations of the design. What got me thinking about this is back when I began skydiving, there were AADs (automatic activation device) that would sense certain parameters and fire your reserve automatically. They had been out for decades, including those in ejection seats, but because they were analog and mechanical, a lot of jumpers, including myself didn’t use one. The last thing that you needed was to have your reserve deploy into a good canopy.
Then a Swiss company named Cypress invented one that used a digital processor and more reliable way of releasing a reserve canopy (small pyrotechnic cutter), and the damned thing was nearly flawless. It took a little while, but they are pretty much default equipment now.
A rethinking of the device along with some recent technical innovation made it reliable enough to be widely accepted.
The simplest, but extremest option would be a way to mechanically stop/seperate the drive linkage on the tail rotor. It would really only be of use in situations like this, but it could certainly be a life saver.
Haha…probably wasn’t in the NOTAMs… 
Now, in addition to a RAIM prediction page, we also need an earthquake probability page…
Allegedly:
“According to a report I saw online this guy put on a larger, heavier engine without adding additional engine mounts. In fact the aircraft manufacture told him specifically not to put that engine on. The extra weight combined with the hard impact resulted in what you see here.”
Or in other words…
(yes I’m just looking for excuses to repost this).
An electric engine converted Cri Cri…what is the wing loading on that thing? It seems like it would be very high and not very engine-out friendly…
Wiki says: Wing loading: 55 kg/m2 (11 lb/sq ft)
Which is not all that much…Cessnas and Pipers are around 13-15 lb/sq ft I think…
I like it, but that cockpit it’s so cramped that if you sneeze you literally self bird-strike / destruct.
I really love that clip! 
Very interesting aircraft and honestly a shame that it never became a succes.
Pratt and Whitney in the news again, and once more the bad kind of news too:
I am not familiar with this engine but it looks like we are seeing the last stage LPT(Low Power Turbine) or the PW equivalent. It’s the final rotor/stator combo that will extract energy from the air before releasing it into the exhaust section. You can see a temperature probe on the left side.
Now then, a closer look will bring some some evident destruction on the blades of this final stage. And unless something hard and big has propagated all the way from the front to the back, then the most plausible conclusion is a significant failure of one of the earlier stages with one or more blades failing to stay seated in their disks…
Not a good thing at all.
The Airbus A220 (AKA Bombardier C Series) is a brand new airplane, so that would have been a low hours engine. Not good at all.
Indeed, it’s from the same family as the much troubled A320Neos PW engines and probably shares most of it’s tech with that.
I really wonder what the ability of PW is to survive all of these problems.
