Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of the biggest fountains of knowledge on the internet, but it turns out he’s not right about everything. One YouTuber has gone to extreme lengths to prove a point to him about helicopters, after the astrophysicist and science guru posted on Twitter about them. You might think that if an engine fails in a helicopter mid-air, then it’s naturally going to plummet to the Earth, right? That’s the sentiment Tyson posted on social media in 2015, writing: “FYI: An airplane whose engine fails is a glider. A helicopter whose engine fails is a brick.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter From then on, Destin Sandlin from the SmarterEveryDay YouTube channel worked to prove this “misconception” wrong. “I’m going to get into the back of that helicopter and power down the engine to really see what happens. How do we get back down to Earth?” he said in a video which has been viewed more than eight million times. STRAPPED INTO A FALLING HELICOPTER - Smarter Every Day 154 www.youtube.com Sandlin was joined by helicopter pilot Gerry Friesen, who stated that he believes landing a helicopter with an engine issue is far safer than landing an airplane with a failing motor. The idea revolves around the concept of “autorotation”, with Sandlin saying: "If the rotor blade quits turning you are going to fall like a brick – but helicopter pilots have a physics trick to keep that from happening." According to the Federal Aviation Administration, autorotation is “the state of flight where the main rotor system is being turned by the force of the relative wind rather than engine power… In this case, the potential energy of altitude is converted to kinetic energy during the descent and touchdown." As Sandlin explains in the video, there’s a biting point where the helicopter blades act like a fan on descent in “pinwheel mode”, allowing safe descent to the ground. So, there is a safe way of landing a helicopter when the engine fails – and Neil deGrasse Tyson isn’t always 100 per cent right about everything, it seems. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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