Casualty 30 Year Anniversary Helicopter Crash.

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JohnR

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Time for another of my banal questions?

On Saturday 27th August 2015, it was the long running BBC medical drama Casualty. As a feature of the episode an air ambulance that was coming in to land at the hospital and was struck in the tail rotor by a toy drone about to 12-18 inches in diameter. This obviously caused the helo to go out of control and crash in the ambulance bay of the Emergency Department.

My question is this, is the tail rotor that fragile that a childs toy would have damaged it sufficiently to cause the helo to go out of control? My personal though is that it is a pile of you know what, and that the tail rotor would have just minced the drone.

The helicopter looked to be an AW109.

Regards.
 
Didn't see the programme (don't watch much TV and certainly not THAT nonsense) but from experience of both types of platform, my best estimate would be the 'drone' (still hate that term - 'drones' are for target work) gets minced and the rotor blade(s) suffers minor LE damage.

All connected with that dreadful programme should suffer the sort of fate that would make a medieval torturer balk.... ;)l
 
Never seen anything hit a tail rotor (I suspect one of these flying toys would get minced on anything bigger than a R22) but I have seen a greater black-backed gull (weight up to 4lb/1.8kg) go through the main rotor of an idling S92. Quite spectacular, it rained gull mince and feathers on a rather hacked-off helideck crew! Prompted a shut-down and inspection but the crew reckoned all was well and off they went.

Mind you had the toy gone into an engine, that's probably more realistic.

The BBC have previous form for chopper crashes in soap operas. In Roughnecks, a 1990s comedy, an incoming chopper was 'shot down' by a release of gas and mud from a piece of well control equipment. Oh how we laughed.

Chris
 
Here's a Loach hitting tree limbs. Might be only a glancing blow on jut the tips of the limbs, but that still seems a reasonably fair analogy to a drone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmZp6SItJ6I
 

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