"The rotor blades are not fixed rigidly to the helicopter," Chris explained. "Only centrifugal force keeps them in the position you see, so during severe turbulence the motion can push the tail boom up around and into the blades. That's bad. The best way to counteract it is stop fighting the helicopter and let it bob around in the sky waves."
If that sounds hard, that's because it absolutely is -- Chris likened it to learning to juggle on a unicycle on top of a beach ball. And if that's too whimsical for you, here's what it looks like when that juggling lesson fails:
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"We're gonna need a lot of duct tape."
Adrian told us that sometimes even a simple shift in weight can be catastrophic, and that's not even a setup for a joke about your mom. "I was supposed to fly a family of four around town. What I didn't know was that while I was getting ready, the family decided it would be best to let one of the girls sit by the left-hand window, and instead the father had seated himself behind me on the right-hand side."
So one side of the helicopter ended up way heavier than the other, and that's all it took. "The rear and left side of the helicopter took off, while the right and forward part did not. Thankfully, the worst that happened was that we drifted a bit before the helicopter fell back onto its skids."
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Worst-case scenario, the skids land about a mile downfield.