I can normally fly F3C style quite well, but yesterday was very windy and gusting when I arrived at the field so I thought I'd just practise approaches and hovering in various orientations with my Raptor 50. All was fine - then I was doing nose in which I am quite competent in but the blustery wind was making it a challenge. The heli was facing into the wind at this time.

Using Glass rotors which were well tightened in the grips. Head speed was around 1700.

On one occasion, just as I was touching down (quite lightly - no impact) I had a sudden, and to me, inexplicable boom strike.

There are two possibilities that come to mind

1) A gust got under the rotor disk at the front, lifting it and causing the rotor to dip lower than normal at the rear. With the skids already on the ground, the body of the heli could not rotate backwards (pitch up) to match the rotor disk.

2) After picking up the pieces, I noted that the link to one blade grip had popped off. Turned out it was cracked, but this was on the rotor that did not impact the boom. Is it possible that this crack caused the incident? I tend to think this this was crash damage but I'm not sure.

Anyone got any other ideas?

Just as an aside - only one blade impacted, but the other was also destroyed. The sudden deceleration caused the lead weight to rip out through the glass skin - pretty impressive. Spindle shaft was surprisingly, not bent, stabilizer bar was of course bent but can be re-straightened.