(This post is about the small plane taking out the police helicopter. Reminder: I am a professional helicopter pilot. As in, I support my life and family by working as a full-time helicopter pilot.)

There is a tremendous, near-unanimous outcry within YT comments about how the helicopter is at fault for ”sucking” the small plane into itself. This is the most ludicrous concept I can imagine. To agree with me, you do not have to be an aviation expert, an atmospheric science expert, or an adult even. You just need a memory.

Exhibit A: How many movie scenes have you watched where people exit a running helicopter and simply walk away? They are much lighter than a plane. Why didn’t they get sucked into the helicopter? (Answer: Because helicopters don’t suck people into them.) More pointedly, military helicopters infil and exfil troops all day and night, all around the globe, while running at 100%, on the ground, in a hover, and troops even skydive out of them, and no one gets sucked back in. I have even unloaded one of the rubber boats out of the back of my helicopter and neither the boat nor the dudes got sucked up into the helicopter. Moreover, we have all of us watched a helicopter hoist operation succeed. We see the man descend on a cable to go pick up someone stranded on a rooftop or in the water and then we watch as they ascend back up into the welcoming arms of another crew-member. No one, not even the initially empty cable gets sucked into the helicopter.

Exhibit B: How could this helicopter suction threat be so real and yet so ineffectual for so long? Where are all the other instances of helicopters just vortexing the shit out of everything around them for the past, I don’t know, 85 years?

Exhibit C: Helicopters fly formation with each other uneventfully. To include hover taxing around. In the Air Force we would typically fly around 50 feet from each other. Sometimes closer (whether by accident or for a specific reason) and no aircraft get sucked into each other.

Exhibit D: When people watch a helicopter spool-up its rotors from nearby (often holding their phones up for what they fear may be their last chance at capturing footage of yours truly in action) they take a bracing step back to prevent them from falling backwards, not a bracing step forward to prevent them from getting sucked into the helicopter. And they don’t worry about the phone being yanked from their light grip.

How stupid are we? We are so stupid that we proudly and adamantly declare that a helicopter sucks planes into itself.

And why? Because we saw it for ourselves, on a tiny screen.

The real truth is we saw the movie Wizard of Oz, Twister, Twisters or some other CGI footage of a tornado which showed the whole world being sucked into a tornado, and then we saw the footage of the collision on our tiny screen. We then concluded that the same vortex of suction occurred in both the movie and the footage.

But guess what? Real tornados do not suck items into themselves either. Again, you don’t have to have any special talent or training to know this. Don’t believe me? Search for videos of tornado footage. You will not find any footage of a tornado sucking objects into itself. Why not? Because tornados don’t happen the way Hollywood portrays them. Items are flung. They are tossed about. They are bent, broken, and destroyed. But they are not sucked up into some swirling, acute, airborne flushing toilet spiral.

To be clear: if we want to suggest that there is an “outside”, a “wall”, and an “inside” of a tornado (which is an atmospheric misnomer already) the flying debris does not move from the outside into the inside.

Okay. I’m done. We’re idiots. And getting worse.