On the afternoon of March 3, 2000, a helicopter operated by a Miami television station crashed in a suburban neighborhood, killing the pilot and the photographer who was with him. According to early press reports, a witness on the ground had seen the tail rotor “snap off” as the helicopter performed some sort of maneuver. Readers of those reports who distrusted flying machines in general and helicopters in particular must have felt confirmed in their doubts. It would later emerge that the helicopter was innocent; as is most often the case, human actions led to the disaster.
The helicopter was a McDonnell-Douglas MD-600N, an eight-seater with a six-blade main rotor. Nicknamed “NOTAR” (NO TAil Rotor), it uses a fan and louvers in a thick tail boom, rather than the conventional propeller, to control yaw. Thus, the witness’s account of the tail rotor snapping off referred, actually, to the tail boom, because there was no tail rotor as such. The tail boom did, in fact, come to earth a couple of hundred feet away from the main wreckage.
