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I believe NYT carried an article last year about an RC chopper flyer who got beheaded by his own chopper's main rotor. It happened in the Central Park. It was a

• icebraining 11y ago
  Not beheaded, though the blows did kill him, sadly. But yes, the huge blades [1] compared to the small and softer wings of a quadcopter make a big difference. [1] http://i.ytimg.com/vi/bA3wp9h3abI/maxresdefault.jpg http://i.ytimg.com/vi/bA3wp9h3abI/maxresdefault.jpg (same model that killed him)
• soylentcola 11y ago
  These little quads use much smaller propellers and they run on smallish batteries. I've got a cheap quad and it's so light you can chuck it at someone as hard as you can and would only hurt them if it hit them in the eye. When I'm flying it anywhere that has even a chance of other people being around, I use the prop guards on it (at the expense of weight/flight time) so nobody would get smacked by a spinning rotor if it somehow ended up near them. For the most part, these little ones can probably hurt you as much as being hit with a rogue frisbee in the park. No decapitations. The bigger ones (Phantoms and the like) are more autonomous and better at avoiding crashes. Still, it's always a possibility and if you think you have any business flying one, you will know not to do so in a manner that makes it likely to hit anyone. I think of it like riding a bike or a motorcycle. When you ride a bike you are supposed to stay on the road but a lot of people (especially kids with smaller bikes) will sometimes ride on the sidewalk or through the park anyway. This isn't usually a big deal because they won't do any major damage in the unlikely event of a crash. But an adult on a large bike or a motorbike will get a ticket for riding on the sidewalk because you can do a lot more damage and you're probably moving a lot faster. As an adult on a big bicycle or motorcycle, you're obligated to only ride it in such a way that you don't put people at unnecessary risk. I think of the little toy quads as the equivalent of kids' bikes and the Phantoms and larger video-centric copters like motorcycles. Sure, fly the toy in the house or in the park but if you're carrying cameras and gimbals and big battery packs and larger rotors, you really need to plan your shoots and locations to avoid the greater risk (IMO). It's a fair tradeoff for a fun hobby.
• gwern 11y ago
  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/nyregion/remote-controlled-copter-fatally-strikes-pilot-at-park.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/nyregion/remote-controlled...
• mapt 11y ago
  He was flying a Trex 700-class stunt helicopter, with a large 1.6m diameter single rotor. He was using it for complex aerobatics - high accelerations, very high turn rates, very little respect for the gravity vector. You can't do these sorts of things at all with human-sized helicopters - they're not maneuverable enough. In fact, the increase in maneuverability as high-powered single-rotor helicopters scale down is actually a problem for human reaction time. Model helicopters conventionally used a mechanical flybar in order to make the helicopter less responsive to inputs and more controllable. More recent innovations in flybarless electronics have enabled fly-by-wire control to substantially speed up responsiveness while still permitting stable flight when desired. A single-rotor stunt helicopter is very different from a camera multirotor. A 1.6m carbon fiber blade vs a (usually plastic) 0.1-0.4m blade. A high-powered two-stroke engine vs a battery and motors. And very importantly, the purpose of the two aircraft is entirely different. This type of helicopter uses collective and cyclic pitch oscillations, and a rudder. That's a completely different control scheme than a normal multirotor, which uses differential thrust. It lends itself to storing energy in the angular momentum of the blades at low collective pitches (running the rotor progressively faster while hovering), and then releasing it all in a maneuver by setting the pitch higher. That means the flat, strong carbon fiber rotor blades can be travelling at a tip speed of 400mph or higher. Even a very large camera-toting quadrotor is likely to have a (plastic, thin, bendy) rotor tip speed in the 100-150mph range - they're optimized for hovering battery life, and differential throttle has limited maneuverability, and the slower & larger the better. Being so much ligher per (disposable, easy to break) prop means that even at similar tip speeds the angular momentum is much diminished. "Video footage has emerged of Mr Pirozek, who was a world-recognised aerobatic flyer, putting his Trex 700 helicopter through a series of remarkable tricks, including one that involves dropping the $1,500 model out of the sky by turning off the engines and restarting them just before the model chopper hits his head." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0wvXoZ9KYg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0wvXoZ9KYg Lastly, "beheaded" seems to be a linkbait overstatement, and is considered dubiously by the medically inclined - even with all the power behind those blades, the skull is a very strong thing. The eyewitness comment was that there were wounds to his scalp, which tabloids turned into "cut off the top of his head" and then into "cut off his head". There were wounds to his scalp, but the ones to his throat are likely the ones that killed him. You don't need to sever the spinal column to slit a throat with a sharp blade.