Bob CollinsWell here’s something you don’t see every day. A helicopter with no rotor blades.
They fell off. And by “fell off,” I mean they went flying, including into a nearby truck, where, fortunately, nobody was sitting. If it’d happened a few seconds later, the result would have been tragic.
It happened in Big Lake, Minn., in July 2017 as a pilot was about to make his fifth agricultural spraying run of the day and heard a loud snap, the National Transportation Safety Board said in its final report this week.
It said the cause was a crack in the metal portion of the blade within the wooden portion of it that was undetectable. The blades are no longer manufactured, but there are still about 200 of them in service.
What do you call helicopter blades once they fall off? Kindling.
