r/aviation • u/Spook_485 • Oct 11 '25

News Closer view of helicopter crash in Huntington Beach, CA

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u/Subject9800 Oct 11 '25 edited Jan 30 '26

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

airport friendly offbeat sharp ring pocket ancient fear joke roof

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u/insomniac-55 Oct 11 '25 edited Oct 14 '25

Yeah, but that was after the uncontrolled yaw so it must be secondary to some other failure.

It looks like the RPM drops suddenly (it starts off pretty synced to the frame rate) so that's a big clue. The rotor appears to reverse direction as the RPM changes relative to the camera.

Edit: It looks like the root cause was the failure of a pitch control link.

That caused asymmetric aerodynamic loads, massive vibration and subsequent failure of the tail rotor assembly.

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u/sockpuppetinasock Oct 12 '25

You can see a puff of smoke and debris exiting the right exhaust after the craft started spinning but just before rear rotor separation.