Recently, at a public model aircraft flying exhibition, a 4-year, 10-month old child named Justin was flying with his father, Benny, at his side. He was carrying the proper insurance, was a registered pilot, and had a track record over the previous year of successful flights. His accident rate apparently seemed a little bit higher than that of more experienced flyers, but not exceptionally so.
His training was principally performed with his dad coaching on a simulator. This isn’t very different from most other radio-control aircraft pilots. There’s usually a button on the controller to allow you to reset the simulator if you crash. Spending $200 on a simulator — roughly 1/2 the cost of a modest model airplane — will often save you far more than its value in crashes as you build the correct reactions. Regardless, the kid has mad skills. I mean, seriously, he out-flies most adult helicopter pilots.
Saturday at this exhibition was very busy. Little Justin was flying a “T-Rex 600”. This is a radio-controlled electric helicopter which weighs about six to seven pounds. The helicopter’s main blades are carbon fiber, and routinely reach about 2000 RPM and are 1350mm from tip to tip. The tips of the rotor blades at that RPM are spinning slightly faster than 300MPH, and the helicopter itself is capable of flying faster than 100MPH.
The field was very busy, and Justin had been forced to land repeatedly to make way for other aircraft. This field also has the distinction of being very long and narrow, with the audience only 25-50 feet behind the flight line rather than the more-usual 100 to 200 feet. Immediately following one of his landings, Justin resumed his routine. He began a “rainbow” or “tic-tock”. In this maneuver, the helicopter describes an arc in the sky, usually backwards, ends up inverted, then negative pitch is applied and it arcs back to the starting position. This isn’t something a full-scale helicopter can do, but it is a dramatic maneuver for a model. Properly done, a rainbow looks very much as if there is an invisible string tying the tail of the helicopter to a point on the ground, and the helicopter is a pendulum swinging on that point. Thus the name.
Unfortunately, in this instance the tail of the helicopter was facing the wrong way. Instead of an arc in front of the pilot, the helicopter arced over Justin’s head and into the audience behind him. It impacted the ground less than a second after the start of the maneuver, and apparently rebounded with all or part striking a fellow named Wen Wu.
Wu is alive. He suffered a nasty 2″-3″ gash to his head which required numerous stitches to close, his vision may be permanently affected, and he has several other lacerations.
However, model helicopters and airplanes have killed people before. In small numbers, admittedly. Last year in England, a young girl walking through a park was struck in the head and died. The adult pilot was, if I recall correctly, in his fifties. In 2004, at an airshow in Hungary, a 1/4-scale airplane piloted by a very experienced pilot ripped into the crowd as a result of a radio lockout, killing an elderly couple and severely injuring several others. In 2002, a fellow training a helicopter pilot was decapitated by the heli when his adult trainee lost control.
Less-lethal incidents are fairly common, too. At two helicopter expos this summer, helicopters crashed, striking bystanders with wreckage. In those cases, however, they were either photographers or assistants near the flight line, not audience members, and understood the risks of being that close. One of my club-mates received a bad prop strike to his fingers while preparing his airplane; although the fingers are intact, he’s injured badly enough that he’s almost certainly not flying anymore this season, and perhaps the next.
On the forums, many people have been quick to blame the father of the boy for this accident, indicating that they thought a five-year-old had no business flying a potentially lethal aircraft. The exposition was so busy that many experienced pilots have strong concerns about flying there. The flight line was unusually close to the audience (which is, apparently, a big part of the draw of this event, that you can be right up next to the action). A radio lockout seems unlikely (since it’s a spread-spectrum unit and nobody else experienced interference), and it simply seems as if the boy found himself in an unexpected orientation and didn’t correct fast enough.
Questions abound online, but from my point of view, there are some clear facts. Age doesn’t seem to be the issue, as fatal and near-fatal accidents occur in this activity with some regularity. The accidents usually involve adults. What does seem clear is that at NEAT, the flight line was too close to the audience, and that’s something which can be corrected next year without imposing some sort of broad sanction or age limit on the sport as a whole.