MOVIE CLICHES ... HELICOPTERS

 

• In movie land, there's an abundance of corrupt helicopter pilots. Villains have no problem renting a helicopter complete with pilot who doesn't mind shooting total strangers, or being shot at.
• When a helicopter is hit by a bullet or rocket, it'll explode immediately if it contains a villain, but if the hero is on board, it will lose power, smoke will come out of the doors, and it'll just reach the ground in time for the hero to get clear then duck just at the moment it explodes.
• People standing outside a running helicopter can always talk in normal or just slightly louder than normal voices.
• A pursued hero, with the bad guys just yards behind him, can jump into a shutdown helicopter, run through the twenty-five item start-up checklist, engage and spin up the rotors, take off and be out of pistol range before the bad guys catch up.
• Bullets shot at a helicopter bounce off the fibreglass and aluminium "fuselage" components but make neat little holes through the plexiglass bubble.
• When a helicopter's engine dies, the main rotor immediately stops and the helicopter drops straight to the ground. If a bad guy is flying, the helicopter disappears in a ball of flame, but good-guy pilots just get out, dust themselves off, and walk away.
• When a turbine-powered Bell Jet Ranger helicopter is shot at, it's engine coughs and sputters, chugs along for a little while as the hero staggers through the air uncertainly, and then crashes using the good/bad pilot algorithm noted above.
• Every helicopter shutting down emits the chirp-chirp-chirp sound of the rubber drive belts disengaging, in spite of the fact that only the famous Bell 47G (the Mash chopper) actually makes this sound.
• Piston helicopters always start up with screaming turbine engine sounds.
• Rambo-style pilots can fly with one hand on the cyclic stick while the other fires an automatic weapon out the door. The helicopter automatically knows when to change altitude to fly over obstacles without the pilot worrying about that pesky collective pitch control.