I find this helicopter slightly disturbing

That's virtually impossible as they will be running on gears made of very high quality materials.

I don't like helicopters from a safety point of view but they do seem to be well put together and crashes seem to be usually operator error or something as silly as not enough fuel. Rather than rotors crashing into each other.


Not sure how the old bird strike thing works with that sort of vehicle.

Is the one in the OP a manned aircraft or one of those autonomous crop sprayer units?




ETA from Wikipedia about an unmanned version crashing


"The investigation determined that the crash was not caused by mechanical problems,[42] but by unexpected tailwinds. As the helicopter was making the delivery, it experienced tailwinds instead of headwinds, causing it to begin oscillating. Operators employed a weathervane effect to try and regain control, but its 2,000 lb load began to swing, which exacerbated the effect and caused it to contact the ground. The crash report determined that it could have been prevented if pilots intervened earlier and mission planners received updated weather reports; diverging conditions and insufficient programming meant it could not recover on its own and required human intervention"

The line is attached at the other end to whatever it is lifting!

Yes I cringed slightly at the guy walking round the front with the blades still spinning up. A gust of wind can cause them to dip or whatever. We (my company) killed an HLO (offshore helicopter loading officer) who walked round the front of an S76, which has its rotor disk tilted well forward when on the ground. His head had a battle with the metal rotor blade and unsurprisingly the blade won.

Years ago we were doing heli resupply from Sterling camp something went amiss and the helicopter [puma] went forward instead of into the air, the blades did a good job on a mobile refueling bowser, unsurprisingly nobody wanted to go on jollies after that, except me who had no choice. The fuel for resupply used to be carried in nets under the helicopter like the video

Some are metal (generally older ones) and some are composite (generally newer ones). The S76 being designed in err, 1976,  has metal ones. Composite ones are better for damage tolerance though, especially those without a spar.

The first large helicopter I flew was the S61 and it had metal blades. The structure was a hollow box section metal spar (titanium, maybe?) on top of which were “pockets” ie aerofoil shaped things, lots of them on a row to make the blade aerofoil section.

Trouble was, like all metal things, it could suffer from metal fatigue / develop cracks. If you lost a blade, you’d probably be dead before the rotor head completed another revolution due to the out of balance / sideways acceleration forces snapping your neck.

So they pressurised the inside of the spar with nitrogen and had a pressure sensor. If there was a crack starting to develop, the first thing that happened was the nitrogen pressure dropped which bought on a cockpit warning.

On the French helicoptera I flew (Puma, Super Puma and its later developments) the blades were composite with no spar, so the load was well distributed and consequently they were very damage-tolerant.

And they were fairly tough - when they first came out (on the Puma) the manufacturer produced a film of a test rig complete with rotor blades whirling round and being moved through a forest, cutting down trees. Well saplings really, but it was quite impressive.