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About midway thru this video, this ems pilot shows debris from a Kentucky ems chopper crash that looks identical to the Hudson debris, and the cause was in fact a mast bump. His theory is that the tail rotor seized or failed, causing the strong right yaw seen, and that a hardover recovery attempt caused mast bump which bent the shaft shearing off the transmission. Makes more sense than anything I've seen to date.
In the Kentucky crash, similar to the Hudson, the tailboom broke off after the trans left the airframe.

I should have remembered:

When I was at the Sikorsky Factory, I rented a room from an former USMC 53D pilot who worked for Sikorsky.

He was kill in a high hover testing a CH-53E...the bearing race in the swash plate (there is a rotating and stationary swash plate in all helicopters with a single main rotor connected by bearings in an enclosed "race") super heated and the swash plate seized, snapping the pitch change rods and the rotor blades literally ate the 53E alive at 200ft agl.


Thank you for the update.

SeaHawk, WOW! That's bad.!! Really bad !!!
One would think in this day and age, there are temperature probes monitoring everything?
Or at least Temperature stickers showing getting hot from last flight...?
Next-
It is EZ for us to armchair all this, and I am sure it will be an EZ forensic to refigure the catastrophic events in order.
As far as the mast bump, ?? I still doubt it.
why?
We can see the whole thing: transmission, mast, rotor head, and structure all twirling dwn to the river.
Next, the trained reaction (reflex) for loss of T/R authority is not to yank the collective or cyclic.
If the transmission did seize, that would explain the lurch of the airframe, and the departure of all the parts.
The ripping of the transmission bed and parts just got torn out of there from what is called sudden stoppage. Maybe.
That whole assembly is a lot of mass to have the brakes slammed on (so to speak)
Albeit, we usually think of sudden stoppage as a rotating assembly contacting something, rather than inboard failure.

Was thinking about the possibility of the kid causing the crash when I think of Seattle based Tom Stewart: https://www.nydailynews.com/2012/11/11/5-year-old-sydney-stewart-caused-fatal-2010-helicopter-crash-

Watch the video, skip the first 10 min or so.
He doesn't rule out another cause, ie transmission failure, but the photos of the damage from the two crashes are very, very similar.

^^Greglepore,
In this situation, it is all detective work until the answer is found.
I am as curious as anyone else.
For sure, I would not be getting in a 206 until the answer is identified.
In my exp, the mast bump will shear at the bottom of the rotor head.
The chopper was flying straight and level at the time it came apart, at least it looked that way.
Not a reason for mast bump.
If that is what you are saying. But I have been wrong in the past, like prolly yesterday, so it might happen again? LOL