Curious what actually happened here.

Poor technique used for landing in whiteout conditions led to a collision between the two helicopters.

I'm just a lowly R44 pilot but I do winter op's all the time up here in my icy and snowy land. I can think of a number of ways to screw this up with one measly R44. Double or maybe quadruple that when two helicopters are involved, especially big, powerful ones that can really whip that white stuff around.

I'm sure we've got some MIL rotary wing guys here who can answer this better than me.

Trail aircraft hit something (tree?  Ground?) and slung stuff into the tail rotor of the lead aircraft.  One wound up upside down.  There are numerous videos on the interweb from different angles.  Safe money says cause is whiteout but they didn’t say so.

ETA: info is from This article.  Rereading it they say “lost a blade”… blades don’t just fall off in flight.  One of the videos you can see a main rotor blade fly out of the cloud and land maybe 200m away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQg9Ev9SEFA

Looks to me like #2 ended up in the position #1 was low hover.   Could it be #2 moved into #1?  #2 main rotor struck #1 tail possibly.

Got to see the Chinook sling these off the mountain yesterday. Pretty cool to watch the process.

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