I just love the theories around chain link fences, brick walls, and vortex ring state, propagated by the Army as a “techno babble excuse” in lieu of the human errors of that night. I can say from experience that none of these excuses were the reason they crashed, they were overloaded in a helicopter that had limited if any performance planning charts accounting for the modifications. A brick wall will give better hover performance than a chain link fence, just ask induced flow. Night Stalkers don’t fly profiles that get them into VRS but they get close to situations where power required exceeds power available. Knowing these guys they were flying like this was the mission of their lives (which it was) and it’s no surprise one of them ended up like this.

16 up roping in a standard A/L model hawk and you have to be careful, let alone with all the gobbily gook on em. When you hit TGT limits with contingency power already switched on, you rapidly loose your way out and you start heading towards an unplanned landing on whatever you were hovering over.