Building on the work of Nogin, we prove that the braid group $B_4$ acts transitively on full exceptional collections of vector bundles on Fano threefolds with $b_2=1$ and $b_3=0$. Equivalently, this group acts transitively on the set of simple helices (considered up to a shift in the derived category) on such a Fano threefold. We also prove that on threefolds with $b_2=1$ and very ample anticanonical class, every exceptional coherent sheaf is locally free.

We give a characterization of products of projective spaces using unsplit covering families of rational curves.