Awesome Helicopters

R/C chopper pilot Alan Szabo Jr. proves that Tareq Alsaadi isn’t the only one who knows how to do crazy tricks with his helicopter. Watch Alan make his ALIGN Trex 800E DFC zip around like a flying Tasmanian devil. That lawnmower bit at the end, whoa.

(LOUD) We’ll say this once. If you get motion sickness, DO NOT hit play. But for the rest of us, this dizzying video shot from the perspective of the rotating blade of a Russian Mi-8 helicopter is pretty neat. We’d love to see the same thing in slow-motion.

Joby Aviation’s two-seat fixed-wing flyer has 12 propellers to help it take off and land like a helicopter, but can stow eight of them and flip the other four to turn it into a conventional airplane while cruising. It uses electric motors to fly at speeds up to 200 mph.

We saw a ceiling fan that looked like a chopper a while back, but we’ve never seen one in action. The Big Ass Fan above isn’t actually attached to this helicopter, but the working tail rotor on this one really completes the effect. (Thanks Frenk!)

Daredevil Felix Baumgartner’s latest stunt has him behind the controls of an aerobatic helicopter, hovering dangerously close to drift racer Jakub Przygoński and his 1000hp Toyota GT 86, playing a game of vehicular cat and mouse.

Well here’s something you don’t see every day. In order to save a cow stuck at the top of a mountain with a bad hoof, a crew lifted the animal out via helicopter. We love how the cow is so nonchalant. Like, hey, this is a pretty cool view, man.

The military version of Amazon Prime Air. The Autonomous Aerial Cargo/Utility System is a US Navy program that aims to convert helicopters into drones, which can the be summoned for supply drops via a user-friendly mobile app.

The West Midlands Police shows why you should never aim a laser pointer at an aircraft. First of all, it can distract or even temporarily blind the pilot. Second, you’re literally pointing out exactly where you are.

This one-man helicopter is powered by hydrogen peroxide gas rockets attached to the tips of its rotors. While we’re guessing it’s not the safest aircraft ever made, we’re duly impressed that it gets off the ground at all.

Helicopter fly-overs provide one of the coolest perspectives on rally races. In this clip, the chopper pilot demonstrates his impressive flying abilities, keeping up with every move of the drivers below. More footage here.

YouTuber Tareq Alsaadi demonstrates his upgraded Goblin 770 RC helicopter by showing off his piloting skills. Watch as he makes his toy look like something from The Exorcist. Or Key & Peele‘s excitable valets.

While we prefer that helicopters we fly in remain upright, Red Bull helicopter pilot Chuck Aaron demonstrates some of the stomach-churning maneuvers you can pull off in a chopper if you really know what you’re doing.

We had no idea that R/C helicopters could be so powerful, but in this video from HeliGraphix, they appear to have lifted a woman off the ground using two heavy-duty remote-controlled helis. Watch them pull a boat, with passengers, here.

We’ve seen huge remote-controlled jet airplanes, so it’s time to give a helicopter the spotlight for a few minutes. Josef Schmirl’s incredibly-detailed R/C chopper sounds like a real helicopter as it buzzes by, and even has a tiny crew inside it.

YouTuber Dan Clark pilots a helicopter to harvest Christmas trees at the Noble Mountain Tree Farm in Oregon. It seems like the trees were already uprooted and bundled before he picked them up. Here’s a POV video of the task.

A marvel of modern engineering, E-volo’s electric helicopter uses 18 rotors to lift its passenger compartment off the ground. It’s designed to lift two occupants for about 20 minutes on a charge. Significantly refined since its early prototype.

Hex is just like a tiny RC car, except it flies. It’s cheap, it’s easy to control and it’s easy to customize. It uses 3D printed shells with different shapes, sizes and number of propellers. It can also be fitted with a camera.

NASA recently conducted a series of tests in which a helicopter fuselage was dropped from about 30 feet to help improve safety in crash landings. Frankly, it looks like kind of a fun ride. Or maybe a quick way down from a treehouse.

A couple of years ago YouTuber João Guimarães woke up to the sounds of a firefighting helicopter. The firefighters borrowed some water from his swimming pool to put out a nearby fire. The pilot’s maneuvering skills are amazing.

(NSFW: Language) We like to keep a cool head, but some pesky garden bugs could really use some termination with extreme prejudice. Like many awesome gadgets however, the tiny but mean UH-60 is obviously too good to be true.

A one-seater helicopter designed for zipping over rush hour traffic. We’re not certain about the airworthiness of Héctor del Amo’s chopper design, but we’re all over the concept, and hope to see something like it produced at some point.

R/C pilot Bert Kammerer takes the lessons we learned from this helicopter flying video to a whole ‘nother level, flipping and twirling his chopper thorough a seemingly physics-defying flight. Bert, will you please come mow our lawn?

For a brief moment, we were convinced this POV video was shot from a truck’s dashcam, but the unmistakeable sound of the rotor quickly reveals that we’re flying inside of a helicopter.