Yesterday morning, our club does our monthly Combat event. We get out and do 2 rounds of general combat mayhem, where we circle around and try to cut streamers and knock out other people's Versa Wings and Assassins out of the sky.
We had 11 planes launching all at once, right at the edge of the runway, all at the same time, to go and fly in a crazy pattern to smash into each other.
Well, one of the requirements with that is that you all wear a helmet or hard hat for safety, when the combat events are going on. Here's mine:
Look carefully at it. You'll notice that there are some scratches on the front of the helmet. No, it wasn't from a fall; it was from a Versa Wing launch that went awry, and smacked full tilt into my helmet.
Apparently, the battery came loose upon launch and caused it to spiral out, right back into the group of pilots standing at the line. It caught me square on the helmet, knocking it clean off of my head (I didn't have the chin strap fastened). It rung my bell a little bit, but I kept flying right through it the entire time. Everyone else had panicked, but my biggest thought was, "Keep the plane in the air. Keep your eyes on the plane, don't let it get out of control and fly into everyone else, or over the freeway and into traffic."
I managed to keep flying, finished the round, and landed just shy of the circle on the runway that gives you extra points if you land in it. Afterwards, everyone asked if I was ok, and I said, "Yep! I know it was a freak thing, and it didn't kill me or injure me in any way. Helmet took the brunt of it and I'm fine."
I'm very lucky, but let me tell you that it's good to have someone watching for when there are that many birds in the air at once, and in an event like that when the safety officer says, "Wear a helmet," you DO it, no matter how dorky you think it looks. It was a freak thing; our current and former safety officers said that it was something they've heard about happening once at another field, but never actually saw it happen. Lesson learned - helmets can save you from serious injury.
We had 11 planes launching all at once, right at the edge of the runway, all at the same time, to go and fly in a crazy pattern to smash into each other.
Well, one of the requirements with that is that you all wear a helmet or hard hat for safety, when the combat events are going on. Here's mine:
Look carefully at it. You'll notice that there are some scratches on the front of the helmet. No, it wasn't from a fall; it was from a Versa Wing launch that went awry, and smacked full tilt into my helmet.
Apparently, the battery came loose upon launch and caused it to spiral out, right back into the group of pilots standing at the line. It caught me square on the helmet, knocking it clean off of my head (I didn't have the chin strap fastened). It rung my bell a little bit, but I kept flying right through it the entire time. Everyone else had panicked, but my biggest thought was, "Keep the plane in the air. Keep your eyes on the plane, don't let it get out of control and fly into everyone else, or over the freeway and into traffic."
I managed to keep flying, finished the round, and landed just shy of the circle on the runway that gives you extra points if you land in it. Afterwards, everyone asked if I was ok, and I said, "Yep! I know it was a freak thing, and it didn't kill me or injure me in any way. Helmet took the brunt of it and I'm fine."
I'm very lucky, but let me tell you that it's good to have someone watching for when there are that many birds in the air at once, and in an event like that when the safety officer says, "Wear a helmet," you DO it, no matter how dorky you think it looks. It was a freak thing; our current and former safety officers said that it was something they've heard about happening once at another field, but never actually saw it happen. Lesson learned - helmets can save you from serious injury.
