Huns Valen
Locations where this happened earlier this evening:
Solang / Les Cigalons (near 155, 11)
Rua / Old Cave of Rua (near 70, 12)
Sequence:
  • You're flying across a sim border.
  • The land you're about to enter in the target sim has damage enabled.
  • "Injured" noise plays.
  • You die and are teleported home.
This has happened to me several times over the last week.
This is likely related to a highly repeatable bug in which a vehicle gets nudged by a few degrees (sometimes moreso) when going over a border. If you want to see that bug, try landing at Hollywood Airport in Santa Catalina, where the runways are very close to the edge. You'll often find the nose of your aircraft pointing in a slightly different direction after you've crossed the border. There seems to be some kind of spurious collision event that takes place, even if it's an airplane and not in contact with anything at all.
The phenomenon doesn't always have the same magnitude, but the hysteresis of "nudging" seems to scale inversely with aircraft mass. I have a very small aircraft (motorcycle-sized) that can be thrown off by multiple tens of degrees. Larger aircraft seem less susceptible: something the size of a Cessna 172 might get "tilted or panned" by 15 degrees or less.
Corroborating evidence: The "nudging" effect is readily apparent at low speeds, when the aircraft's kinetic energy isn't much higher than that of an avatar. Go over a border at 30 meters/sec, when the aircraft's kinetic energy is many times higher than that of an avatar, and you won't see any noticeable effect.
My guess would be that this is a race condition that occurs while linking the avatar to the seat on the airplane as the handoff completes: they collide with each other during the split second that elapses between bringing the avatar into the sim, and linking it to the seat.
Now, does the avatar have to be non-phantom while this is occurring? Probably not. Avatar collision hull is useful on vehicles, but it's not so critical that you couldn't do without it for a moment on region handoff.
As I recall, over damage land, collisions can injure avatars, and vehicles forward damage to avatars as well. So, if the avatar is colliding vigorously with the airplane for a split second due to this phenomenon, the avatar would take damage.