[wincy]

He didn't have a helmet or so much as a seatbelt in the helicopter. The tail rotor flew off, hit the main rotor at a high speed, which knocked him sideways, out of the fuselage. It was at this point his head came into contact with the spinning main rotor, likely killing him instantly. A seatbelt seems like it would have saved his life.

It was recorded, which is how I know this, I honestly wouldn't suggest looking for it as it's pretty horrific. It's sad that such a smart person didn't apply the most basic of safety protocol though.

[wolfretcrap]

I am also a farmer and inventor based in India.

Problem is that we do not have many tools, indian made tools cost 3-4x of Chinese tools and have 2x worse quality on average

80% things which exist in West (made in China) does not exist in India on top India doesn't make many things. Plus we suffer from too many middlemen problem, where the end product is inflated away beyond the affordability of masses.

Not everything is available in India, when I lived in US and Germany, I felt as if I was living in heaven I could order any part and it will be at my desk within a day or two but here in India you can have money yet you'll not find what you need.

India doesn't have any marketplace for makers like Ebay or even McMasterCar.

In small cities getting even the right size bolt, nut and screws is damnn too difficult let alone compression fittings etc.. which are more involved.

Surprisingly no startup has taken this issue seriously.

As the inflation has increased, labor cost has also significantly increased and more Indians are forced to take DIY approach thanks to abundant wealth of knowledge available from youtube and reddit experts (now even homeless people on streets can be seen chatting on WhatsApp with their friends, data has got so cheap)

Material availability still a major problem outside of the big cities with 10 million+ population. Most startup founders (people with resources, knowledge, network) also live in big cities so they don't really know what problems 70% of Indians face who are still living in villages, towns and small cities.

[blueblisters]

This is so true.

It sucks India does not have a hardware ecosystem similar to Shenzhen. There is no capital available for independent innovators who want to build hardware products. There are few skilled engineers who can develop the tooling required to make parts like screws, fittings etc. at a scale and price that makes sense for the market. Import duties to encourage import substitution have only made parts more expensive and made logistics more complex.

I think the attention given to IT services and software companies and startups has left the hardware industry without talent or capital. If you can make 5-10x as a software engineer than a tooling engineer, it makes zero sense to study mechanical engineering.

[baybal2]

Google T-Works Hyderabad

[Aeolun]

He was able to procure helicopter parts, presumably he was able to procure a rope to tie himself down.

[sombremesa]

Yep, less of a parts and more of a culture issue w.r.t. the lack of safety mechanisms, though the difficulty in sourcing quality parts certainly played its part in this incident.

All the cars have seat belts, so it would’ve been pretty easy to obtain one compared to the rest of the parts involved here.

None of the auto rickshaws have seat belts, for example, and lots of construction workers forgo helmets. No one cares, and furthermore people exacerbate the issue by trying to fit as many people as possible into these vehicles.

It’s a miracle that people wear helmets from time to time, though it’s still quite rare for pillion riders and whole families try to sit on two wheelers.

Human life is cheap in India.

[wolfretcrap]

>Yep, less of a parts and more of a culture issue w.r.t. the lack of safety mechanisms, though the difficulty in sourcing quality parts certainly played its part in this incident

Who doesn't want to live longer? I even know a local welder who went to local welding supply store and all they had was shade 11 lens, through which he couldn't see a damn thing and now he welds without any shade. That's the state of affair in India.

Sure in factories, boss doesn't pay for protective gears so the people who need the job have to do without it.

Most autorikshaws are not driver owned, they are owned by some guy who probably owns a bunch of them and rents it out to drivers. Drivers get penalty left right on road from traffic police and lose a lot of money to repairs, rickshaw owner, fuel theft etc. At the end not much is left for the driver let alone for safety installs.

As people become richer they stop using rickshaw and drive their own cars.

Lot of people don't wear helmet because it's hot and humid in India and its really hard to wear it in 38*C in bright sun on 70% RH.

An average person in India has so many problems, the general mood is agitated and forgetful as a result. Most look for escapes and might not even be paying attention to things on road.

[sombremesa]

> Who doesn't want to live longer?

You answer your own question here:

> Lot of people don't wear helmet because it's hot and humid in India and its really hard to wear it in 38*C in bright sun on 70% RH.

and here:

> Most look for escapes and might not even be paying attention to things on road.

This culture is not amenable to valuing lives very highly.

I've noticed that a lot of comments here echo the sentiment above and you're the only person defending this attitude as being borne out of the lack of convenience (which no one is arguing with, however, that's no excuse in places where human life is actually valued).

[ncr100]

All very good examples of the increased difficulty of life for the group of people you are talking about, @wolfretcrap.

I wonder if this overall difficulty shapes a person's attitude to be more risk-tolerant?

Like, "I haven't died yet from XYZ, and I might die from ABC tomorrow, so therefore I am comfortable participating in risky behavior PQR today!"

?

[wincy]

Sorry to hear that. It’s definitely a tragic story. I ordered some things from McMaster Carr just the other day and it arrived within a few days. I get frustrated sometimes when the parts I need have to ship from China and take a month. But they are cheap and they’ll arrive eventually.

It’s definitely sad to see genius wasted because the tools just sometimes aren’t available in places like India.

Thanks for this information, it’s easy living in the US to forget just how easy our lives are in so many different ways.

[wolfretcrap]

>I get frustrated sometimes when the parts I need have to ship from China and take a month. But they are cheap and they’ll arrive eventually.

This remind me of the time when some local makers were ordering parts from aliexpress it was talking on average 30-40 days to arrive at their door and they were only ordering the parts that could not be substituted easily.

Then one day government of India decided to ban aliexpress.

[e3bc54b2]

I was not aware Aliexpress got banned. What is the next best alternative?

[wolfretcrap]

Banggood ships to India, they don't have everything that aliexpress has but I've been able to source stuff not available locally.

[sudosysgen]

Perhaps Taobao?

[benhurmarcel]

Even in Europe we don’t have an equivalent to McMaster Carr. We can certainly procure the materials we need, but as far as I know there’s nothing quite practical like that US shop.

[supermatt]

Can you recommend a few places? I really struggle getting specific parts in LT.

[amjd]

Agree with this completely.

Moreover, India as a country has a lax attitude towards safety. When you are fighting to get the basic stuff, the safety aspect does not even cross most people's minds. This can be observed pretty much everywhere. In most construction sites here we don't see the workers wearing hard hats, which are seen as a bare necessity in developed countries.

As someone pointed out, in this case the accident could have been prevented by forming a makeshift seat-belt out of cloth, but the inventor probably wasn't thinking about safety at all.

[wolfretcrap]

>In most construction sites here we don't see the workers wearing hard hats

Well they do it mostly because laws are not strict in India even if they are its easy to bribe off the enforcer and this saves the contractor money while he maximize the profit.

It's not that average Indian is more greedy than average European it's just the enforcement system in India is easy to bribe away, so risk for not following proper safety guidelines is less in India and an open opportunity to save money on protective gears.

The true failure comes from average Indian not being able to demand better standards from those in power like Europeans have managed to.

[metalliqaz]

s/security/safety/g

[amjd]

Thanks, I knew it sounded a bit odd. :'D

[jacquesm]

Yes, this is a very good point. Access to good tools is essential to do this kind of work safely, you can have all the knowledge in the world, if you can't measure accurately, test your welds non-destructively, machine things without adding stresses that the material is ill equipped to handle and assemble properly then it is very easy to mess things up in a critical way. Miss an inclusion in a weld (which could very easily happen), have some vibration due to imbalance, a hairline fracture from metal fatigue and with a helicopter as your project it can only end in one way.

[4gotunameagain]

One would assume that if you have the resources to attempt to build something that resembles a helicopter, you would have a way to source a cloth strip to tie yourself to the seat.

Not trying to diminish the magnitude of the disaster, but I think your argument does not apply in this case

[jobigoud]

I think they were saying for the cause of the accident, not the seat belt part.

[trhway]

sorry, i think you don't get it - the point is that you don't have all the necessary things. Which things out of the missing things were really necessary - that is rearview 20/20. This time it was strip of cloth, other time it may be something else.

[sokoloff]

I think there’s a counterpoint which is “while you may not have everything, it seems wise to use those things you do have.”

I cannot fathom that a person with the skills, resources, and tenacity to DIY a helicopter could not lay their hands on at least a car seatbelt and a scooter helmet during the course of the project. I wouldn’t be surprised if the crash scene was within sight of both of those items.

“Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect.”

[jjk166]

If you don't have all the necessary parts for your helicopter, you shouldn't be trying to fly it. Maybe there are things that you don't truly need, but this is a terrible way to figure which.

[svrtknst]

It's also not just a strip of cloth - it's a decent strip of cloth, fasteners, nuts, bolts, washers, something to fasten the seatbelt etc.

Which isn't a lot and I think this is an unfortunate oversight, but I can see it being a bit difficult to do properly.

Of course, doing it improperly with a rope would probably have been better than not at all.

[dukeofdoom]

When I visited India, I drove by this area where there were there were stalls with Indians breaking up old rusty equipment back into parts. Much respect. I think people in the west, don't have a clue how hard some people work for so little return.

[vishnugupta]

As a noob robotics learner I ran into tools challenges very early on. There are some online places but as you pointed out the quality is outright bad. I just gave up that hobby as i didn’t find it worth all the frustration.

During a business trip to Berlin I visited a typical departmental store and was absolutely blown away by all sorts of tools being sold. I was like a kid in a candy store. I mean it wasn’t even a specialized store but a Walmart kind of generic store. Imagine how it’d be in a dedicated hardware store!

[Abishek_Muthian]

> Surprisingly no startup has taken this issue seriously.

There are few tiny startups catering to small niche e.g. https://diy-india.com sells tiny screws, shafts etc. for reasonable price. But they hardly get the support needed to scale up to something like McMaster-Carr, Which the startups emulating western startups or EdTech startups get in India.

With Chinese eCommerce sites banned, The time for entering this market has never been more lucrative.

P.S. I run a validation platform and I have started to track this need-gap - https://needgap.com/problems/284-online-marketplace-for-hard...

[t0rt01se]

While there's some truth to this, I think there's often too much regard for 'jugaad' in many parts of India which sometimes just manifests as 'penny wise pound foolish' behaviour.

[spywaregorilla]

I believe you when I read this, but my primary takeaway is that given these constraints, you should not try to build a homemade helicopter

[4silvertooth]

>India doesn't have any marketplace for makers like Ebay

Never going to forgive flipkart for killing ebay india, it was a heaven for tinkereres.

[hkt]

Has there ever been an attempt at solving the problem with a cooperatively owned retailer? They're a little old school but useful for changing markets that are dysfunctional, and overcoming a lack of capital by allowing members to combine their (individually too small) means.

Similarly, are there groups where people with these interests communicate about how frustrated they are?

[mekkkkkk]

I read somewhere about the postal network in India and how it suffered from a widespread lack of organized addresses. If it's still true, perhaps this is a contributing factor to why it might be hard to keep up and achieve scale for eBay clones?

[wolfretcrap]

No logistics is no longer the issue. Arrival of amazon and Flipkart fueled lots of logistics companies, now it's all sorted and amazon delivers to even the remotest villages in India.

[chakkepolja]

Remote villager here and no, amazon doesn't deliver here (have to go to nearby town). But I agree with your broader point.

[kumarvvr]

Agree so much. There is a huge gap in availability of quality components in India. Very difficult to get and even if we get, very costly.

But I guess it is time for us to have stores like the ones in US, large hardware stores.

[datavirtue]

Where you can't find anything including anyone to help you?

I have to source various hardware for building projects and with five big box stores within a few minutes of my house it is always an absolute pain, if not impossible, to find what I need. I walked into Menards the other day and couldn't get 2" cabinetry screws...a commonly stocked basic fastener. Our big box hardware stores have turned into seasonal home goods stores.

[LAC-Tech]

What do you farm and invent?

I work in Ag-Tech and I've got some interest in India, seems like a growing country (though still with a lot of issues as you point out...)

Would love to hear about what you do.

[Natsu]

Back in college, one of my advisors was a control systems engineer. He showed me the matrix of PDEs for the helicopter & the control system. There was also a simulator where the height of the helicopter was fixed and you could just tilt the main rotor forward or back to move and you could try this with or without a control system.

The helicopter was completely uncontrollable without the control system. In the simulator you'd just end up spinning around or something, but that was only because it held you at a fixed height for demonstration purposes.

Seeing that demo made me realize how incredible it is that people have made helicopters work to begin with. They really don't seem to be very cooperative without a lot of work in controlling them.

[TeMPOraL]

Nowhere near the same level, but one of my proudest moments in gaming as a teenager was being able to complete a single mission in Search and Rescue 4. It took many, many hours of futzing with the game interface, and even more hours reading up on helicopter controls on the Internet. Without the latter, I couldn't really understand what's going on with the controls.

I know it's just a videogame, but it gave me a deep respect for helicopters, in a way that normal flight sims didn't give me for jet planes.

In the process, I've also learned a bit about the mechanics surrounding the drive train and the main rotor blade, and to this day I'm impressed by how it was made to work. You have a couple tons of metal, + fuel and people, hanging from the sky off a spinning rod with lots of tiny, rotating parts. The more I think about it, the more I realize I still don't have a good intuition for strength and wear-resistance of materials involved.

I wish I could fly one for real. Maybe in another life, when I'm someone with more time, money and risk tolerance. For now, I'll just wait for someone to build a nice VR simulator, and maybe my friend and I can resume our high-school competition in autorotating after simulated engine failure in bad weather.

[mLuby]

> I wish I could fly one for real. Maybe in another life, when I'm someone with more time, money and risk tolerance.

That dream is much more attainable than you might realize. "Discovery flights" are pretty cheap, and of course you're going up with a seasoned instructor who guides you through a few maneuvers. Highly recommend it!

[TeMPOraL]

Thanks! I didn't realize "discovery flights" are a thing!

[45ure]

>but it gave me a deep respect for helicopters

You should check out Felix Baumgartner and Fred North on Instagram.

https://www.instagram.com/therealfelixbaumgartner/

https://www.instagram.com/fred_north/

(login required, unfortunately, or you can get Barinsta from F-Droid)

[nradov]

I haven't tried it myself but DCS supposedly has a fairly accurate helicopter simulator.

https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/products/helicopte...

[zdkl]

The old line of rotary-wing aircraft "beating the air into submission" is so gloriously accurate on every level. Those pilots are wired different, kind of like submariners (checklists, roles/responsability, ...) in order to deal with their complex environment.

[exDM69]

There still are helicopters that are controlled purely mechanically with no assistance from electronics etc. There are lots of small helicopters, not unlike the craft in the article, flying every day.

Flying helicopters is pretty difficult (I've only done it in sims, and I'm moderately good at it after a lot of hours), but most of them are not like unstable jet fighters that can't fly without computer control.

That said, autopilots and gyro stabilization are pretty common in modern helicopters.

[alisonkisk]

There's an old joke that anyone who studies physics knows that helicopters are imposible.

[Natsu]

I saw those scary looking matrices and the stack of papers you needed to understand to do anything with them, so I can believe it.

[kumarvvr]

Was he smart?

I give credit to him that he is intelligent, dedicated, hard working, etc.

But smart? If he was smart, he would know that a helicopter is one of the most complex flying machines ever designed. Everything is so critical, from design of the mechanical system, right down to quality of welds and quality of material used.

I have seen pics and video of the copter. Its a frame, and some blades, welded in some shop. Not safe.

Also, there is a reason individual components are extensively tested before final assembly. He should individually have spun the rotors and blades in a separate fixture, beyond their design limits to assess quality. Looks like he made some designs, built them, and directly assembled them, without any plan or purpose. That is appalling.

I feel sorry for his loss of life, his efforts could have been used somewhere else. There are many people cheering him on. But I strongly believe, being an Indian and living in India and being in an engineering industry, this sets a very bad example. How long before students and amateurs see the amount of media attention he is getting and try to emulate him, hurting / killing themselves and others in the process?

[flyinghamster]

> I have seen pics and video of the copter. Its a frame, and some blades, welded in some shop. Not safe.

Not only that, but how well did he really know how to fly a helicopter or any other aircraft? It's pretty bold to be your own test pilot when you haven't had instruction in the first place.

Here's why you don't try to fly an unfamiliar aircraft without instruction, even if you have a pilot's license: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAwwKoz8Diw

Years ago, when I was taking sailplane lessons*, someone brought his brand-new autogyro to the airport. For all practical purposes, it was just a frame with a pilot's seat and a column for the main rotor. He fired it up, started down the runway, pulled back on the stick too soon and too far, and went tumbling when the main rotor contacted the ground. He was securely belted in and didn't get hurt, but his brand-new toy was a total loss.

* I got cold feet after a scary but harmless crosswind landing.

[mLuby]

The same could be said for nearly every pioneer of the sky (and sea) and for most explorers in general. Many died, and we celebrate the successes for de-risking that frontier for the rest of us.

> his efforts could have been used somewhere else.

I take your sentiment to be heartfelt, but putting one's competitive advantage to the collective above one's dreams sounds rather joyless. Anyway, the Market provides ample incentive to abandon dreams and chase one's maximum value; perhaps it just wasn't offering enough in this man's case.

[pm90]

It seems rather unlikely that others would be encouraged by his death.

[kumarvvr]

Don't you think there will be others who will think "he was killed because of X Y Z, I can do better" ?

[hutzlibu]

Well, if they choose to take the right lesson, like "safety matter", then it might be a good thing.

[iamgopal]

True that. Most important part that is not taught in engineering is, testing. Anybody can make anything, even rockets are not so difficult, but creating a testing and checking framework around the build system takes all the efforts. Elon musk said that, almost 100 times more efforts go towards design and making system that make rockets than actually designing rockets. Some conveniently forget the first ( most Tesla and spacex competition ) and fails miserably.

[hughrr]

Urf I did go looking for this and found it. You’re spot on.

India is not known for looking at what can go wrong. There are many YouTube videos out there showing you how to make things with electricity which can kill you dead instantly. What’s worse is they never discuss safety and you only get to see the survivors.

My favourite is the (now removed) video of repairing a switch more power supply. The guy has a mains lead made up for his oscilloscope with no earth and is handling the probes and casing on live mains connected SMPS with no isolation transformer. One slip and he’s dead. I did wonder how many people he’d killed who watched it and did the same.

[system2]

So many Indians die for easily preventable accidents. LiveLeak is full of them. You shouldn't even think about their train rides and their adrenaline games.

[hughrr]

Ah yes a colleague of mine is Indian and he said trains are a major natural predator of his race :)

[zapdrive]

Safety comes last in India. Everywhere from construction to road, safety is usually the last thing people spend money on. I'm saying this as an Indian living in India.

[wolfretcrap]

Safety costs money.

All those masks, gloves, helmets are not cheap in India. Saddest thing is even if it's being made in India the raw material for making this comes from China and taxed by Indian customs.

If you've choice between buying yourself protective gears vs a new welder to weld the rotor which one do you think will be take him one step closer to his dream?

Sure protective gear can give him more time but most have choices to make, if he could fly this helicopter off the ground, highly likely he also knew about the protective gears yet he choose to not have any maybe because he didn't have much money.

[webmobdev]

Another factor is that safety gears (atleast what is available in India) is not developed keeping the weather condition in mind. On construction sites, I have observed that in hot and humid weather, the workers hate wearing safety gears as it makes them very uncomfortable. Some even fear that it'll give them a heat stroke in such conditions, and thus avoid it.

[dredmorbius]

Ballistic protection (and much more rigorous materials and component testing) seem like they'd have played a more critical role than a seatbelt in this particular instance.

That's not to say that personal restraint system isn't a critical component of safety equipment. Just that its role in this specific mortality mode would be negligible.

Helicoptors are complex. There are many ways they can kill you (or those around you).

[tyingq]

In this particular case, his neck wouldn't have been hit/cut if it had stayed inside the plane of the open frame door.

Anything could have happened. But for what did happen, a 4 point belt would have sufficed.

[didntknowya]

helicopter accidents are notoriously hard to survive though, seatbelt or not.