Chuck, Its the stuffy Bitish respect for rules and regulations, you have seen how we like to stand in queues!
Whereas, on Vancouver Island not that many months ago ...
"Of course we aren't breaching any low flying rules, we're going to land ... somewhere, eventually."
"Two thousand feet? What's that? We'd get nosebleed if we ever went that high."
"There aren't any rules here, we just do what we like."
"Oh, on a day like this we only fly routes we know, we wouldn't go anywhere we didn't know the way to." [Viz being a few hundred metres, if that, in some directions only, through the thinner patches in the fog. They
were flying, too, I saw them, but refused to go with them.]
and so on and so on and so on.
Actually they do have one rule there - when flying through a narrow gap between two mountains I asked whether there was any convention as to which side of the valley one flew on (being used to East Anglia), and it turned out there was.
Sigh. Much more fun than round here.