3 ms·
Yeah, my first thought was that retaining someone qualified to fly one of these things is going to be significantly harder than affording the vehicle itself. T
by wtracy 6y ago
Yeah, my first thought was that retaining someone qualified to fly one of these things is going to be significantly harder than affording the vehicle itself.
There's such a thing as weekend airplane pilots, but no such thing as weekend helicopter pilots. Developing the skills to fly a helicopter takes a very serious time investment. (And that's before you have a family of vacationers shoving stuff willy-nilly into the helicopter!)
- dkdk8283 6y agoThere absolutely are weekend helicopter pilots. I have my PPL and at my airfield there are quite a few hobbyists and interesting jobs that don’t demand many oncall or flight hours.
- FabHK 6y agoDon't you think, at least, that flying heli is more like flying fixed wing IFR (really need to fly regularly) than flying fixed wing VFR (do a few hours and a checkout after 5 years and you're good to go)? So we're talking committed weekend pilots...
- jacquesm 6y agoThere are definitely weekend helicopter pilots. There is a whole slew of them that will seat just the pilot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ultralight_helicopters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ultralight_helicopters Accident rates are nothing to be happy about though, flying a helicopter is a lot harder than flying a light plane and flying into an obstacle or having something fail resulting in a crash are all too common. Helicopters are quite delicate compared to planes as well and even though they can usually auto-rotate that's better described as a controlled crash than an emergency landing. Personally I'd never ever want to be in one of these but compared to a wingsuit they're probably safer.