Learn to fly a helicopter??
is it possible to want to learn to do too many things? my fascination with helicopters began as a kid, my grandfather taking me to a local airport -which was general avaition at the time- and we watched the helicopters take off and land...whirlybirds, he called them. i miss him so much...
fast forward to my late twenties, I'm living in Michigan and my friends are either pilots or people working for local aviation companies, and my first helicopter ride is with a man who was with the Airborne division, flew chinooks in viet nam. He owned a small helicopter and was paid to take an aerial photographer up weekly ... he was at a local county fair and asked me if I wanted to go up...the doors were off and I was brave...I'm very scared of heights, but this was such a rush...
his claim to fame, was in the 70s he was chartered to take a guy up to view property, and soon he had a knife at his throat, forced to land inside the grounds of Jackson State prison. the story had a good ending, but how scary is that?!
so I've been up in a Bell jet ranger twice, and was sold on the idea of learning to fly one myself...so much is sensitive touch, handling the controls. then I met someone who flew twin engine planes, reminding me that if there's engine trouble, helicopters drop like rocks, while if an engine fails on a twin, you have the other one, and failing that, the thing glides, and you pray there's a place to set it down...but a good pilot always has a contingency runway, sooo I gave my ground school material away and that's the end of my whirlybird story...
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