http://www.nbc.com/ER/
"A few weeks ago I mentioned the heavily promoted helicopter crash on "ER," but never followed up with details of that episode once it aired. As it turned out, the whole episode was incredibly strange, and seems even stranger in retrospect. / First of all, the crash. A medical helicopter is taking off from the roof of the hospital. A med student, Neela (Parminder Nagra, the lead from "Bend It Like Beckham"), and a nurse are just stepping back into the elevator after delivering a patient to the copter, so they don't notice the helicopter tipping from side to side behind them. Next thing you know, the nurse is leveled by shrapnel from the broken helicopter blades. But the whole scene remains eerily quiet except for the sounds of mechanical failure and metal scraping metal. There aren't even any shots of the pilot struggling to get control, an unusually minimal treatment that calls to mind (and perhaps purposefully mimics) the heavy breathing and the hiss of bullets hitting the water in that heart-stopping first scene of "Saving Private Ryan." / Cut to eeevil surgeon Romano (Paul McCrane), who steps outside for a breath of fresh air after making a delivery to the rooftop helicopter, but narrowly misses the mayhem. If you'll recall, Romano lost his hand and arm to a helicopter blade last season, so close contact with copters makes him nervous. And if you lost interest in "ER" post-Clooney, Romano is the resident asshole, the doctor who lets un-p.c. slurs fly; the character we're supposed to love to hate. The next time we see Romano, he's in front of the hospital yelling at a med student he catches smoking weed, oblivious to the terror unfolding several stories above his head. He then steps into the street at the exact moment the helicopter comes tumbling off the roof. Romano has just enough time to drop to the pavement and scream straight at the camera as we see the flaming copter plummeting down on top of him."... [www.salon.com] ... he's dead, wrapped in metal [evdm]