Heliconkers

I don't know if they have this sport in every corner of the world, but here in the UK, among little kids at least, Conkers is (or used to be) a very popular seasonal pastime. What happens goes thusly:

Horse Chestnut trees drop their seeds in those little spiky green ball things. Kids collect them and peel off the outer coating to reveal the inner seed, which is usually bigger than a grape but smaller than a plum. Ish.

Kid then waits for the seed to dry out, drills a hole through it, feeds a bit of string through the hole and ties a knot in one end. In effect, kid now has a kind of tiny organic mace. Kid finds other kid with same, and the game is on.

One kid holds his conker still, letting it dangle on the end of its string, while the other kid hits it with his in an attempt to smash it to smithereens. After each hit, they swop roles. He who is smithereened first is, obviously, the loser. Some conkers go on to have long and illustrious careers, spanning season after season, gathering an almost mythic status, until the kid grows up and they are retired to the attic where they gather only dust. The conker, that is, not the kid.

But suppose the owner of that self-same all-conquering conker, having put away his childish things at the requisite age, finds that in his later life his mind keeps wistfully harking back to those glory days of youthful victory. And suppose he has grown up to be an expert helicopter pilot. With friends in the demolition business. And has other chopper-flying mates who are going through a similar nostalgic mid-life crisis. Should all of these wildly improbable conditions be fulfilled, Heliconkers would be born.

Two helicopters, each with a large demolition ball hanging from them by a long chain, simultaneously take off at either end of an abandoned airport somewhere in the desert. I'm sure you can imagine the rest. Spectators should stand a long way back, and players should expect a very short playing career/lifespan.

Given that much of the skill of conkers was in how you treated your tiny mace (oven roasting, soaking in vinegar, etc), I'm loathe to go for just a big iron ball as an alternative. But coconuts are just too small, and even the biggest seed in the world (see link) just won't cut it. Though I would wince if I saw two of those slamming together at high speed.

Might be something to practice with small remote control helicopters before you bother the emergency services with the full-sized version.

Can you loop-the-loop in a helicopter?

And - to paraphrase Ghostbusters - don't cross the strings.