I once lost my whole tail section, the chopper was really hard to fly but I still made it back to the FARP. It looked like a potato with rotors attached to the top lol.
You are supposed to just install the 1.0.1a patch if you have a clean install, if you installed the 1.0.1 patch then you need to use the hot fix patch.
But since you are from the USA you shouldn't really even need to install the hotfix because it just fixes a problem for users from other countries.