What happens if a couple hundred people panic and jump at once? You'd likely overload the helicopters causing them to go down. Even if that didn't happen, you'd still probably have a lot of people get hurt or killed from landing on one another or having the net tip. Remember, if the net is wide enough for the main rotor blades to clear the building, people would be landing on one side of it creating an unbalanced load.

We do need to improve safety for high rise buildings. It's a complicated problem that has worried fire departments for many years. I'd love to see a bunch of the rescue pros get together for a brainstorming session. No doubt they'd be able to come up with some workable ideas very rapidly.

The problem with people like us discussing these ideas is that we seldom understand the rescue business well enough to know what is workable in the field and what isn't. Perhaps the rescue working group could look at our ideas to determine what might work and what won't.