Helicopter engine loss lawsuits

Tom references "a couple of situations" where pilots lost engines while hovering with no forward momentum, dropped, and died, leading to lawsuits over whether they should have been in the dead-zone of the operating envelope. Used to make the point that hovering is more dangerous than flying.

Oh, the mast. If your mast fails, you lose your blades and you can't auto-rotate, you just drop like a rock. It doesn't matter if you've got forward momentum. I've had a couple of situations where people were hovering and lost their engine and they just dropped and they died, and there's lawsuits and everything because they didn't have forward momentum. Sometimes it was because you're supposed to get out of that area of going straight up or hovering. You're not supposed to hang in those areas where you can't auto-rotate safely for any length of time. So hovering is a more dangerous thing in a helicopter than flying in a helicopter, because you can use your forward momentum to give you some lift on the way down.

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