Concerning "It's also possible that the problem is once SAFE is off the balance is off causing the pitch down." This is not the case. There was more than enough elevator to fly the model, especially if it was able to complete a loop. In this case, the pitch down was sudden, unrecoverable and ultimately catastrophic. This means that something happened in the radio system to give uncommanded down elevator. I can think of a couple of scenarios that might do this. The Spektrum receivers are equipped with AS3X and with SAFE mode. The AS3X function provides momentary corrections to uncommanded pitch, roll and yaw movements, usually due to turbulence. This uses rate gyros that do not have to know which way is up. It just has to detect accelerations about any of the 3 axis and apply opposite control input until the uncommanded acceleration stops. However, the SAFE mode adjusts and limits the extent to which the aircraft can pitch, roll and yaw. this requires the receiver's solid state gyros to be initialized to know which way is up. This is what the receiver is doing when it is first turned on and the servos all go through a double set of twitches. If the servos do not complete the double twitches, then the gyros have not learned which way is up and will respond incorrectly in SAFE mode. The original poster did not state if the servos did the double sets of twitches. Now, why did the Apprentice lose elevator control to where the instructor could not recover? The SAFE function either did not initialize properly or it malfunctioned. One possibility is the instructor failed to recognize the SAFE function was still on and causing the malfunction and therefore did not turn SAFE off in time. OR the radio system links glitched and failed to restore manual control to the instructor's radio. Lacking specific knowledge of how the Spektrum receiver's SAFE mode operates, I will defer to waiting for Andy Kunz to provide a technical answer to this problem.