Helicopter Crash

Russian Ka-52 "Alligator" helicopter crashed near Moscow today, the two pilots were seriously injured, but no fatalities. Unfortunate for the two guys involved, but not really noteworthy. I mean helicopters are always falling out of the sky and killing or injuring people.
    The odd bit is that this helicopter is equipped with ejection seats, which sounds like a really dumb idea for a helicopter. Wouldn't you get chopped in half by the rotor blades before you got clear? I suppose you could make like a machine gun on a WWI fighter plane and synchronize your firing with the rotation of the blades, but you would really want to trust the synchro mechanism on a helicopter that is so broken that it is falling out of the sky? Anyway, they came up with another solution: jettison the rotor blades before you fire the ejection seats. I mean, if the jettison part successfully disconnected the blades they would be gone in a fraction of a second, leaving clear sailing for the guys to boost clear.
    So what happened here? First of all you need to know that this is one of those crazy Russian helicopters with the contra-rotating blades.

Looking at the crash picture, it appears that the upper set of blades is still attached, but the lower set of blades is missing. There is some speculation that the jettison-blade portion of the ejection sequence failed. Either the portion for the lower blades was activated inadvertantly, or the portion for the upper blades failed. In either case, the chopper would have lost half of it's lift and would have started to rotate in an uncontrollable fashion, neither of which are good things to have happen in a helicopter.