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An LAPD helicopter claimed to have ID'ed protesters from above and threatened to "come to your house"
(www.motherjones.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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Talking a whole lot of shit for someone riding around in a machine that will find literally any excuse to break down. Helicopters are sketchy as fuck, and even if you manage to autorotate perfectly to try and recover from a stall, you're still liable to suffer severe or fatal injuries. It's super easy to crash due to human error or some kind of mechanical failure.
A well kept helicopter is a reliable machine as any other, but it's true that it's probably a civil heli with extra cop stuff, ergo easy to down with some fuckery.
Even a well maintained helicopter is a safety nightmare.
I started my career in aerospace at a company that makes helicopter engines and later I became a search and rescue mountaineer/EMT in a county with more helicopters used for SAR than anywhere else in the US. We beat it into our new members "never pass up the opportunity to turn down a helicopter ride".
The mountain rescue association tracks member fatalities and injuries. Helicopter accidents are, by a large margin, the leading cause of line of duty death in mountain rescue, and we spend only a couple percent of our time in them.
Indeed, one of the few mainstream machines where the smallest of human error, mechanical failure, or hell just bad unexpected weather, doesn't just bring you to a stop, but a deadly rapid unplanned disassembly. Screw that.
This simply isn't true. When well piloted and maintained, an helicopter is a safe and sound machine, not a LoonyTunes gag.
Less safe than driving per mile traveled, which is arguably not very safe.
Planes are safer. So is the ground.
Helicopters can't control decent in failure situations. Helos are a safety hazard period. I'm with the never pass up an opportunity to decline a helo ride crew above.
I mean, you do have some control during autorotation descent, but it's at best an extremely hard landing if your pilot is really skilled. They build crumple zones into the seat mounts for them.
It's a pretty cool technique. You adjust your rotor pitch to let you fall faster which let you put/keep angular momentum into your rotor, then at the last minute before slamming into the ground you pull hard on the collective and turn all that angular momentum in your rotor into lift to make it so that you don't slam the ground at full speed. You can manipulate the cyclic control (direction controls) during autorotation, but you're spinning the whole time, so it's very hard to guide an autorotation to a specific landing area.
You're 'spinning the whole time' only if you lose the tail rotor, but in autorotation you're basically gliding, please don't mix stuff up. There are enough misconceptions about helicopters around.
Are you a helicopter pilot? I thought you rotated with power out, just not as fast as you would without the tail rotor. I could be wrong... I only worked on the engines and used them as a passenger. I've only flown sail planes...
I worked as licensed body and engine maintenance and ground crew, and gone on maintenance and transfer flights. Basically autorotation is like on planes, when engines crap out you glide and aim to do an emergency landing, since the rotor isn't a big fan, it's a rotating wing. While descending, the rotor spins and allows the gliding while slowing down the fall, like maple seeds; when near the ground the pilot can use the residual rotation energy to make a soft landing, like you said.