Outwest - out of interest, were the two occasions you experienced VFRs in the S61 in the same flight profile ie flaring to the high hover?
I may have been misleading, I have been in it twice, once in the 61 and once in a 205. The 61 was not what you would call a flare, a simple slowing of airspeed to come to a hover at altitude, and upon noticing that what I would call a small ROD I used a small application of collective to arrest the decent and that fast we were coming out of the sky. The strange thing was the VERY experienced instructor never told me why he wanted me to come to a hover at that altitude, but he knew ( I guess from all the others he checked out) what would happen.
The other time was on a seismic longline job. I was going down the cutline ( downwind) looking for the drill and realized I had passed it. I lowered the collective and pitched up to slow to make my turn into wind and approach the drill. We had no flight instruments ( AS) on the left side or a means to jettison the belly hook from the left side so ( luckily for me) we were flying 2 crew. I obviously came to a very low AS but since I was going downwind I didn't realize this. The next thing I knew we the greased manhole cover and when I got my head back in from the bubble window both low rotor lights ( Yellow and red) were on. By this time the turn was completed and we were into wind. VERY luckily the other highly experienced pilot was pumping the collective to regain RRPM. We were now with the skids almost going thru the tree tops, and yes the longline was still attached ( remember I could not kick it off) how it did not wrap around a tree and drive us into the ground still haunts me to this day.
I have a very LARGE respect for VRS.......