5 Lessons from Learning How To Fly Helicopters

I recently checked off another target on my bucket list, learning how to fly a helicopter. 

I’ve been flying fixed-wing aircraft (airplanes) for a long time, and I’ve had many terrific experiences, from spotting swordfish for a commercial fishing boat from a single-engine Piper Super Cub for my college summer job—to getting type rated in the classic Gulfstream G550 business jet. But while I had logged the occasional hour here and there in helicopters, my total never grew beyond a handful, and I knew that if I didn’t commit to getting a rotorcraft license soon, I’d probably never do it.

So with my checkbook wide open, I flew to Chehalem Airport southwest of Portland, Oregon, to begin my training. It turned out that the transition course from airplane to helicopter to obtain a commercial license instead of a private one could be done for just a few more lessons. This would give me more experience and look better in my logbook.

The flight school is Pureflight Aviation Training, and I was assigned to the excellent instructor Curtis Wilber. Our mount was the French Guimbal Cabri G2, a small piston-engine trainer with just two seats—but robust and forgiving of student-pilot mishandling. 

My training took about six months and involved endless lift offs and touch downs, cross country flights, incredible night flights to the downtown Portland heliport and around the Seattle Space Needle, landings on river sandbars and an abandoned river lock, and many, many autorotations (practicing landing with no engine power) and other maneuvers. 

It was an incredible experience that I’m glad to have completed, even though it was frightfully expensive. 

Here are a few things I learned.

Getting the helicopter to fly isn’t that hard, but making it do exactly what you want is the challenge.

Flying a helicopter is not like dancing on the head of a pin, as some (not helicopter pilots) try to describe the experience. Helicopters, my excellent helicopter pilot friend Pete points out, are like big gyroscopes. They tend to stick in whatever state they’re in, and controlling the helicopter involves persuading it to move out of that stable state into another. Overcontrolling is easy if you don’t let the helicopter settle into its stable state, and once you learn how to do that, the rest is easier.

Helicopters have more ways of causing worse problems than airplanes.

For this reason, it’s very difficult to practice emergency situations in an actual helicopter because you don’t want to turn practice into a real emergency. Simulators would be a better option, but they aren’t widespread in the helicopter industry—although that is changing.

Flying a helicopter takes every single bit of concentration,100 percent, all the time.

No other flying machine gets me into “flow” mode so quickly and deeply. Autopilots do help lower the mental burden, but training helicopters aren’t equipped with autopilots, and the student has to maintain focus at all times.

Helicopters are amazing machines but not miraculous flying elevators that can go straight up indefinitely (like in the movies).

There are limitations, and learning these is a critical part of becoming a helicopter pilot. While I’ve landed in some amazingly tiny places, I have a much better idea now of exactly where helicopters cannot land, or take off, which often imposes stricter limits.

Learning to fly a new machine has stimulated new brain muscles and opened many doors. While learning to manage a whirling machine that some say is a bunch of parts earnestly trying to fling itself apart is challenging—and no one in the world loves taking tests where one mistake can set you back a few grand—the feeling of accomplishment is indescribable— and highly recommended.