CEDAR CITY, Utah — Santa landing in a helicopter on Main Street has been a Cedar City tradition for years, but this year, let’s just say things didn’t go as planned.
Attendee Steve Holm was in the crowd and started to hear chatter when something seemed off.
“The helicopter comes down, it's 20-30 feet off the ground or whatever, and then it just goes back up. And everybody's like, okay, so is he going to come around and circle down and touch down again?” Said witness Steve Holm.
“Hey, a piece of material hit that helicopter,” Holm said. “By now, the helicopter was gone. We don't have time to be scared, right? I mean, it was gone out of the way, and then we're sitting here like that could have been really, really bad.”
Cedar City resident Amy Pichette was also in the crowd, and she had one way to describe it.
“It reminds me of Final Destination, if you think about it, that's all that I could replay in my head, it's like, holy cow, this could have been ridiculous,” she said.
Pichette was also recording when the helicopter came down.
“It happened so fast, I had my phone out, something smacked my hand. My phone went flying down the street,” she said," told my oldest [daughter] shine your phone down, and she does, and my hand is just dripping blood.”
After getting hit with debris, she went to the hospital to get stitches, but still thinks it could have been worse.
“I had my son, who's 11 right here, my daughter who's 10, and my other daughter who's 16,” Pichette said. "If my hand wasn't there, that would have hit my daughter in the face.”
Michael Mower from Southern Utah University, the school that owns the chopper, walked FOX 13 through it.
“As we started coming into the landing zone, it looks like something blew off the roof of some new construction and just came down through the rotor system. The pilot made the right call from an abundance of safety, to abort the landing and exit the area,” he said.
They landed at a nearby airport, and Mower said they walked the landing zone prior and only allowed senior pilots to fly Santa in.
“The biggest change from this year to years past was really the progress on that hotel that's going in right there on Main Street. And again, as we walked, and we were looking at the surface and the surrounding area there on Main Street, we didn't have access to the roof of the building, and that appears where it blew off of,” Mower said.
So, what exactly was it that blew off?
“Not entirely sure what type of material it was. From the video and from the debris that we found after it appears to be some roofing membrane, that plastic membrane that they put on the roofs to waterproof them. It was instantly just chopped up into a million little pieces,” Mower said.
Mower added that while there were no injuries or damages inside the chopper, next year they may re-evaluate the nearby buildings, the landing zone, and the distance between the chopper and residents.
“There's no way around it, aviation is dangerous and can be dangerous. We do everything we can to take the appropriate precautions,” Mower said, "that's what we do day in and day out. When the pilot in this circumstance made that call to abort and go around, I wasn't in the aircraft, but it was probably completely automatic.”
Some residents still don’t want the tradition to end.
“It's an absolute rush when you're that close to a helicopter. If you're through 200 feet away and you're feeling the wind blowing through your face and your hair standing straight up and whatever, that's a rush, and it's amazing,” Holm said.
While others would be fine going back to a sleigh and reindeer.
“Don't land a helicopter on Main Street. There's parking garages, there's parks, there's huge areas. There's a baseball field. I mean, yeah, it won't be directly, right in the middle of everybody, but at least they can see the helicopter,” Pichette said.
Cedar City told FOX 13 it would take time to decide whether or not the helicopter tradition will be upheld for next year.
