The Transportation Safety Board was called in to investigate after a helicopter's blades chopped through a telephone line while taking an injured man to hospital in Pitt Meadows, B.C.
The air ambulance was responding after a man pruning trees fell and injured himself on March 16.
The crew on the ground asked the pilot to land on the road nearby. When he took off again with the patient inside, the chopper's top rotor blades cut into a telephone line, slicing it in two.
The tips of the blades were also damaged, and the pilot put the helicopter safely back down in a field. Nobody was injured and the patient was loaded into an ambulance to be driven to hospital.
Dan Whalen was nearby and grabbed his video camera when he heard the helicopter.
"I have a friend who is a pilot, thought he might be interested in the take-off and was not expecting what we saw," Whalen told CTV News.
He was impressed by the pilot's poise, and said it was lucky the blades didn't come apart and hit anyone.
"They're just very lucky .... They did a nice job of walking away from it."
Whalen's video was used in a TSB investigation that was opened and closed in a matter of hours.
The board called it "an unfortunate accident" and said the pilot simply "misjudged the distance."
BC Ambulance contracts its air ambulance service to HeliJet. The company wouldn't comment on the mishap except to say the job is inherently risky and it has never had an incident like this before.
The pilot has 15 years of flying experience and remains on the job.
With a report from CTV British Columbia's Rob Brown
