I hope it’s still under warranty.
If you are 7 years old and having fun with a rubber-band powered balsa wood plane, you aren’t having fun until it ends the same way.
My older brother’s meticulously crafted WWII aircraft models usually ended their life with paper clips glued to the top, stuffed with alcohol-soaked cotton balls, in a fiery slide of death down a string from a second story window.
Those were the days!
Where could it have gone.
We put a helicopter on Mars, took it on joyrides, captured video, and managed it by remote control millions of miles away. American exceptionalism.
It doesn’t matter that the aircraft is now damaged. This accomplishment wasn’t done by the commies, by some nut job in Kraplackistan, some self-righteous euro-weeny socialists, or whatever country is the pinnacle of DEI ‘success’.
It was done by Americans. Our imperfect but far greater country than anywhere else on Earth. And probably Mars too!
It is a technical marvel, of course, but there is only so much excitement from seeing photos of another patch of dirt.
Thank God it’s dead
Update with new imagery and an animated gif of the one-rotor action.
You need to let it go and think about getting a new puppy or something
Have Amazon deliver a replacement.
The rotors are made from carbonfiber skin over a foam core. Rotor tip speed at the low operating speed is a smidge over 500 fps/340 mph. They obviously weren’t designed with an impact of that magnitude in mind, but it’d be interesting to see a failure analysis.