I hope they were wearing brown pants. That was freaking close!

*fail *wtf

And now, they have to send another chopper.

Adding video to channels (Fail, Wtf) - requested by ant.

What happened? Bad luck with a tail rotor failure? Gust that caught and swung it? Looked like the pilot lost tail rotor authority slowly and it started to rotate and he did the smart thing; grounded it.

or I'm completely wrong.

the first guy also Fxcked up and didnt hop right in.

I don't think the second guy was supposed to get in. He was probably a guide helping get the first (sick) person inside.

That looks like an MD-900, which is a NOTAR, meaning it doesn't have a tail rotor.

Cool pick up! But, doesn't NOTAR have a rotor IN the boom? Driving the ducted air that triggers the Coanda effect?

It has a fan driven by the main gearbox. It's pretty rare for those to fail, but does spin like it lost control of yaw though. My first thought was since it's landing so close to the edge of that cliff, if the wind is moving from the right to left, there is going to be a big updraft coming over the cliff.

Watching it again, it looks like the pilot is having to fight some wind and seems to be having trouble keeping it down. Between 40-45 seconds, it looks like the wind changes as the helicopter appears to lift up and weather-vane into the wind just before losing control.

I found this video which is in German. If the Google auto-translate isn't too off, it says the cause is still unknown, but whoever they're interviewing at the end speculates that the helicopter was too heavy for the altitude it was operating at.

Thanks for those insights---so, is NOTAR a bit less efficient in transferring power (ran out of horsepower to correct the yaw because of that?)

Or do you think it was just the gust was so large (the turbulence at a crest could have been ferocious) that it wouldn't have matter what model helicopter or whether it had NOTAR or a regular tail rotor--it simply would have been overmastered?