[eurasiantiger]

I saw the video. The rear propeller disintegrated during operation, seemingly from material failure. Two of the blades shot out to the ground and the third went into the main rotor a short while after, unbalancing it and causing the blades to hit the fuselage and the helicopter to jump, twist and throw the pilot out.

Very sad accident indeed. It makes one think that maybe the ”hero inventor” stereotype does not lend itself well to our current level of technology: it’s too easy to fatally overlook something vitally important.

[fy20]

> It makes one think that maybe the ”hero inventor” stereotype does not lend itself well to our current level of technology

I'm sure if you look at the history of inventors there are many people who were killed along the way. The Wright brothers were heavily inspired by Otto Lilienthal, who was killed in an accident flying one of his gliders.

Of course this doesn't make this any less tragic, my prayers go out to this man's family and friends.

[system2]

What he means is, we already invented the helicopter and it is very advanced machinery. I wish instead of a helicopter, this inventor chose something like a glider or a plane.

[somedude895]

There's a list of inventors who were killed by their own inventions on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_...

[colechristensen]

You can build your own aircraft, you just can’t shoot from the hip.

From the description, the man wasnt killed by one mistake but at least a dozen at the same time, and all of them avoidable by a one man operation.

You don’t design an aircraft to fly, you design it to fail in ways and for reasons that are very well understood, then you design several ways for each impossible failure to happen gracefully.

[jacquesm]

Helicopters are particularly unforgiving in this respect.

[phendrenad2]

Yep and it's always tempting to push the envelope and attain a tantalizing achievement, even though the safety precautions necessary would cost more than you can afford.

[bombcar]

All those OSHA rules are "written in blood" as they say - and there are reasons for "stupid" rules like seatbelts and such - likely he would be alive had be been solidly strapped to the machine (thought of course he could have died other ways).

[jacquesm]

If not on this flight then on one of the subsequent ones, experimental helicopters are not something for those not schooled in materials science. The good news is that nobody else got injured or killed, that could have easily happened.

When I built that windmill I spent hours planning individual welds, ensuring no inclusions, grinding the mating surfaces to get a perfect fit before welding, annealing them properly, magnafluxing them afterwards to make sure that it wouldn't come apart due to some weld inclusion. It had a safety factor of four because there was a house within throwing range of the blades, and a variable pitch windmill is essentially a helicopter in a different plane. Design speed was 600 RPM, the hub was spun to double that with some weights attached and the plane of rotation angled such that even if it came apart the debris would not cause any damage.

As soon as you start spinning large things fast you need to be really careful.

A windgust managed to overspeed it (it is very impressive to see your homemade windmill break the sound barrier at the tips) and the machine survived without any damage at all.

That was very briefly the most power that it ever made. When the storm died down we pulled it down and modified the governor to ensure that that would never happen again, better safe than sorry.

[bruce343434]

How much power did it generate?

[jacquesm]

Nominally 2500 Watts (design power), in practice about 1500 to 2000 Watts, during that gust it maxed out the meter at 5 KW, so no idea how much more but quite a bit more (I never expected that or I would have picked the range a bit different).

[bumbada]

There is nothing inherently safer about using seatbelts per se.

In fact seatbelts can kill you. I have a friend that went out with his has car and a friend 20 years ago, they did drink too much and had an accident. He was expelled by the acceleration the car had(because he used no seatbelt) while his friend burned alive inside the car.

What makes seatbelts generally safer is that it is a single point of failure, you leave only one possibility for the position of occupants, so you could put a team of engineers working around this single point of failure and develop solutions for that, like now that you know all your occupants remain inside you can make the deposit to absorb impacts, or you can use airbags, that are useless or even dangerous without using seatbelts.

Without seatbelts , there is almost infinite possibilities and combinations of failure, and you can not design against that.

But a solo enthusiast in India has not this luxury.

[meheleventyone]

> There is nothing inherently safer about using seatbelts per se. In fact seatbelts can kill you. I have a friend that went out with his has car and a friend 20 years ago, they did drink too much and had an accident. He was expelled by the acceleration the car had(because he used no seatbelt) while his friend burned alive inside the car.

When assessing safety we can’t argue from anecdote like this. Getting ejected from a car is almost always fatal. Accidents involving fire are pretty rare. Your anecdote is so far from a norm as to be a ridiculous example to assess the safety of seat belts.

[mekkkkkk]

Making the "thrown clear" argument in 2021 is bold if nothing else. Showing that there are circumstances where a seatbelt would be detrimental to safety does not disprove their overall safety. You could find examples of any safety apparatus being more dangerous in some select situations. People are choked by their helmet straps. Safety garments gets sucked into machinery. It's just the law of large numbers.