Originally Posted by
Chris P. Bacon
Who said anything about blade separation? Ever hear of a fly away? Loss of radio? Mechanical failure? Battery failure? The list goes on and on.
I'll answer both posts. Yes, I fly at a school field that's big enough for me to see 100' in all directions from my heli. I'm not so overtasked flying mentally that I can't scan from time to time around me -- in the jet we call it mission cross check time. It's like a little alarm clock that goes off in your head every few seconds. I've been trained to do it for 20+ years and it works. Now maybe that's too much for you, in which case you probably need to plan for that and allow a lot more space, controls, or not fly. Even when I'm flying at a club field, I'm the guy that "notices" everything - cars driving up, out of control aircraft, etc. Again, decades of training to develop and maintain situational awareness in environments that are much more mentally tasking, where things move much faster, and where if you're wrong they send a chaplain to your house.
So yes, I can scan the area, maintain situational awareness, and if someone comes into the area at all, dog on or off leash, then I land. As for the other failures, they're prevented through thorough preflights, redundancy (in some cases), failsafes, and operational limits that allow if something does happen, it's damage to the aircraft only. In case you haven't noticed, helis are inherently unstable, and absent control and if at low altitude, they generally crash within a few rotor diameters if you lose signal.
And no...in over 10 years of flying so far, I've not had one flyaway. EVER. Because I know the limits of my equipment, expect failures, plan for them, and then impose on myself operational limitations that even if everything goes wrong at once, only the aircraft is destroyed.