At the start of the episode, at the shot of people exiting the landing pad, the helicopter can be seen wobbling and then taking off with its door open. Although innocuous in appearance that was a case of "ground resonance", a dangerous condition where a helicopter standing on the ground may start to shake increasingly violently and eventually suffer a catastrophic failure wrecking the helicopter. The pilot took off to prevent this from happening, and the footage was left in the episode.
At the end of the opening gambit, MacGyver jokes that this is the first time someone attended his own funeral and lived to tell about it. But that's exactly what James Bond did at the beginning of You Only Live Twice. That Bond movie came out just after the movie Funeral in Berlin, which was the source of the footage used in the opening gambit.
The pall bearer in the opening is played by Wolfgang Völz, the German voice actor for Dana Elcar's character.
The helicopter experiencing the "ground resonance" is an Aerospatiale SA341G Gazelle. It is the first helicopter to incorporate the Fenestron enclosed anti-torque system and is the predecessor to current models by Airbus (H120, H130 and H135). Ground resonance is NOT a defect in the helicopter itself.
The German actor Wolfgang Völz appeared in this episode as pallbearer. The scenes were taken from the old movie 'Funeral in Berlin' (archive footage). Coincidentally Wolfgang Völz is the German dubbing actor for Dana Elcar as Peter Thornton in all MacGyver episodes too.