In particular, the sprite no longer rotates with the vehicle, and the "loss of collision" mechanic used to emulate flight ceases to function, meaning the heli now collides with whatever you fly "over".

It can be fixed by breaking and replacing the heli, but this wastes fuel.

It's been a while since I played Factorio, so I'm not entirely familiar with the recent changes... Although, a kind soul has contributed a fix for this, and should be in the update either later today or early tomorrow.

That would be most helpful.

Sorry but the new version does not load

The mod HelicopterRevival (0.0.5) caused a non-recoverable error.
Please report this error to the mod author.

Error while running event HelicopterRevival::on_tick (ID 0)
HelicopterRevival/logic/heliController.lua:92: attempt to call field '?' (a nil value)
stack traceback:
HelicopterRevival/logic/heliController.lua:92: in function 'curState'
HelicopterRevival/logic/heliController.lua:169: in function 'OnTick'
HelicopterRevival/logic/util.lua:99: in function 'checkAndTickInGlobal'
HelicopterRevival/control.lua:128: in function <HelicopterRevival/control.lua:125>

It's weird that I don't get any kind of error. What other mods do you have installed? Or rather any additional information would be super helpful...

I've been playing with 004 version with the same bunch of mods for weeks. I have experienced the problems others have reported like heli not rotating. I've also found that on loading the game I can get in the heli, but it won't take off. putting it back into inventory and then placing it again fixes this. Today I loaded the game and immediately got an error from the mod which prevented me from playing until I removed it from the load list. My game then loads OK. I then found the new 005 version, so I loaded that and tried again, but with the result shown above.
Mods I'm using are Adjustable Inventory Size, Aircraft, Automatic Train Painter, Bottleneck, Bulk Rail Loader, Bullet Trails, Clean Floor, Clean Concrete, Factorio Library, FARL, Island Start, Loader Redux, LTN, Mining Drones, optera's Library, Quick Search Item, Rai's Lua Library, Repair Turret, Rich Text Helper, Robot Battery Research, Squeak Through.
As I said before I have been using these for a while now and have not recently added any others.
I'll try disabling some and see if I can narrow things down a bit.

All OK now. I loaded the game without v005. No errors reported. I then saved game, quit, reloaded with v005 enabled. No errors reported. Did the research again. Built a new heli. All OK. Saved and quit game. Reloaded. Still all OK. If I discover anything else I'll let you know.

If I discover anything else I'll let you know.

That would be super helpful. Thank you.

It works fine for me as well now, though my copy of the heli has two flamethrowers due to EGCombat adding one. :P

That's how life works: When in doubt, add more flamethrowers :D

I really should address that multiple flamethrower issue...

Looks like my experience is likely the same as GeePee29. Same error upon loading my save. Disabled mod, loaded my save, all good. Re-enabled the mod and loaded my save, all good, though I have to research and rebuild it again. Might take me a bit because I only recently got blue research up.

Hopefully it doesn't happen again, heh! No idea what exactly happened, but whatever it was, it hit me for both v004 and after updating to v005.

So it's a migration issue...

Unfortunately, I can't replicate the issue due to my immense wisdom to reinstall windows, completely wiping out a ton of saves.

May I ask from which version you migrated? Of Factorio, not the mod itself...

I unfortunately haven't been keeping track of the specific numbers - I'm using the "latest experimental branch 0.18.x" option on Steam, and the update happened yesterday (could have actually come out the day before and I wasn't around at that time to get it).

And yeah, if it wasn't clear before, this error happened after the game updated via Steam. When I saw the error happen twice (one with regular save, one with earlier autosave) I figured to check the mod for an update to see if it was for addressing that issue, but updating the mod didn't help - thus, trying what GeePee29 did and thankfully it worked. (I did rebuild my chopper and used it a little yesterday, no issue.)