Helmet Fire,
Good story about the copilots belongings fouling the controls. There's a very senior officer at the RAF Station where our school in the UK is based, who can top it with his own experience during the ongoing nastiness a few decades ago in Oman. His co's Kalashnikov (for which no stowage arrangements had been manufactured) fell from beside his seat onto the collective during an anti-SAM spiral descent. The problem only became apparent when he tried to open the throttle and raise the lever to arrest the app. 6000 fpm downwards hurtle. They couldn't raise the lever, and the photos taken of the crashsite afterwards show that the pilot was exceptionally fortunate to have survived (..also thanks to the evac people and the exceptional Field Surgical Team at UAG, as always credited by aforementioned Sen Offr).
The moral is still the same, foreign objects and flying controls don't mix.