Quote Originally Posted by deermagnet View Post
According to the Wiki page, which may not be accurate, "one of the hovering helicopters stalled, in a vortex created by its own prop wash and the high compound walls. After the helicopter stalled, it "grazed one of the compound's walls", "breaking a rotor". The helicopter "rolled onto its side" during an emergency landing."

The part that remained inside the walls was destroyed by the SEALS before they left.

They were modified Black Hawks.

Mark
Yup, that's all part of the US Government cover-up. Blame it on "a stall", "a vortex", "or prop-wash" (which BTW is all total BS)-- it's still comes down to Pilot Error. More accurately, it was a simple case that the Pilot didn't hover more forward (deeper, nose first) in an effort to clear the tail boom of the aircraft on the surrounding high concrete fencing.

What should of happened is the sister UH-60 Pilot of the accompany helicopter should have hovered adjacent to the first helicopter and acted as an "aerial spotter" and directed the first landing pilot to pull more forward into the interior yard. Consequently, the first pilot would have cleared the rear concrete fencing and not clipped it on his inbound approach.

The SEALS troop personnel rehearsed the invasion over-n-over for months. It appears that the pilots of the UH-60 BlackHawks didn't rehease jack squat or panicked and got stage-fright once the real deal went live. The pilots should have rehearsed the landing also with a mock-up landing environment complete with high surrounding walls, and used the sister pilot of the adjacent UH-60 as an "aerial spotter" for the first pilot. It's all about prior event training and rehearsal, rehearsal, rehearsal, before committing to the real thing.

It was a very expensive lesson learned (UH-60's aren't cheap), and luckily the accident didn't thwart the overall mission; no one got hurt, and a fellow CH-47 Chinook helicopter was able to extract the remaining SEALS and crew from the downed UH-60 BlackHawk. I'm sure the Pilot & Co-Pilot of the crashed UH-60 BlackHawk are no longer assigned to the SEALS unit due to their mistake.