More Awesome Than You!

I had a weird thing happent tonight. Basically, the helicopter came to take one of my sims to work as an Icon (Top of Show Biz). The helicopter came at 3pm, and he got on it no later than 3:30. And it sat there. At 4pm, a second helicopter appeared to drop off his wife (the mayor). That helicopter left, but the original one was sitting there. The sim inside looked like he was frozen, but his needs kept going down.

Later on, his son tries to come home from his job (which I think is about the same time his dad gets home) and he got stuck in the helicopter too. Both of them couldn't leave, couldn't get out, and their needs kept dropping. Before I exited the house without saving, the dad's hunger bar had dropped into 'omg you're dead' range. I didn't wait around long enough to see if the Reaper was going to show up.

To solve it, I moved them to a new house. I'd been planning on doing that anyway, since they were outgrowing what they had (it was too quaint for a Hollywood hotshot and a political heavyweight)

ANYWAY... to make a long story short. Is this a bug anyone's heard of before? Is there some fix I should download from somewhere, or was it just a random moment of destruction?

Probably a random moment of destruction. Usual solutions involve deleting the offending object and seeing if the problem recurs.

Could I delete the helicopter if the sim was inside of it? I wasn't sure what that would do to him.

Everything seems okay now since they're in a new house, but I was still a touch worried it might happen again.

If you delete the helecoptor with the sim in it, save the lot immediately, then go back into it -- the sim should appear standing by the mailbox.  However, the game may treat him/her as having missed work, so at the least you should use the FFS Lot Debugger to 'Fix Work State' for that sim.