Famous people who died in helicopter crashes

1. CHESS CHAMPION BOBBY FISCHER

Chess Champion Bobby Fischer was en route to play Soviet chess-playing supercomputer Der Spiegel--to the disapproval of the US State Department--when his helicopter crashed in the Atlantic Ocean. Reportedly Fischer was suicidal--as the helicopter went down, he attempted to wrestle the helicopter's controls away from the pilot, shortly after the pilot radioed to the control tower, saying, "I am going to plunge this helicopter with Bobby Fischer in it into the Atlantic Ocean." Fischer's family could not explain the troubled chess player's apparent suicide.

2. AMERICAN ACTRESS KATE HUDSON

Kate Hudson was planning to take a bus to the 2004 Academy Awards, but her ticket was fraudulent. A helicopter pilot was at the bus station at the same time, purchasing a plantain at the famous Sacramento Bus Station Fruit Stand and offered to fly her to the Academy Awards in his helicopter. While en route, the pilot flew into a cloud and crashed into a mountain. Kate Hudson was asleep at the time. She was 45 years old.

3. FORMER PRESIDENT WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON

William Henry Harrison swept into the White House in 1841 after a hard-fought campaign with no fewer than eight legitimate contenders. He delivered a triumphant Inauguration Day speech, which was called "the best ever" by Presidential historians of the day, and instantly won Harrison the respect and love of the country. He boarded a helicopter and the pilot promptly crashed it into White House I (it was rebuilt as White House II across the street later that year; the II was finally dropped by President Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr., who said it made him feel "insecure"). Harrison may have survived the crash, but he was decapitated by a copper wire that was severed by the helicopter's rotors. Unfortunately, the only copy of his speech was in his pocket and burned in the fire following the crash, and it has been lost to history, because no one thought to take notes.

4. LEONARDO DA VINCI

The inventor of the helicopter, Leonardo da Vinci was also a notorious addict. His life was consumed with "rythmyre," an herb with medicinal powers that went extinct after colonists took the existing crop to the New World and found it was inhospitable with America's hostile climate. Da Vinci grew a substantial rythmyre crop behind his house until he was raided by Venetian police who confiscated his house and his yard. It was after this raid that da Vinci embarked on his most fertile period of creativity--biographers believe he painted the Last Supper in order to pay off a series of rythmyre debts, and some speculate the Mona Lisa is a portrait of his main dealer. Still mired in debt, da Vinci began inventing things (it was he, not Edison, who gave us the lightbulb and the chairlift). His greatest creation was the helicopter. The model he built was amazingly complex--the only thing he was missing was the part that makes it fly. Plummeting towards earth from the top of the Tower of Pisa, it is reported the great man's last words were "oh fucc this shit just got REEEEAALLL."