Hovering and winding the clock
You might ask why winding the clock ?
In the mid 2000s there was a spat between the FAA and the South African CAA that ended up with the CAA forcing all SA Comm holders to pass a FAA CRM course.
Our group of eight or so heli pilots were grouped together with about 30 newly qualified Air School fixed wingers.
The lecturer who was an age timed out and retired SAA Chief Pilot gave the lecture but he seemed much more focused in talking to the junior about his airline career especially what they did on night stops.
Eventually we got to the emergencies section of the lecture.The lecture began .......when there is an emergency, first the Captain should remain calm and wind the clock and the FO should get to the check list out and then they should go through the procedures specified.
Our guys were by now thoroughly bored and quiet as most of us were used to single pilot operation and totally uninterested in his flying career.The lecturer noticed this and when he got to the end of the section he looked at us noting we were quiet and not really participating and he asked if any of us had any had any questions.
It was a big mistake as one in our group, and old Angolan Border War pilot with about 12 000 hrs to his name calmly asked, Sir I don't mean to funny but how do I , if I am alone, wind the clock and then pull the manual out from under my seat to find the check list that tells me what to do when the donkey fails on my B3 while I am in a high hover with a bucket of concrete slung below me because at that point I will most definitely need one hand on the collective and the other on the cyclic to try and save myself.
Naturally there was silence for a while and then the lecturer garbled out a non sensical statement and said he had no solutions as he had never flown a helicopter.
Obviously he had been embarrassed in front of the juniors and he quickly got through the rest of the course without any further descriptions of his personal experiences.
It is just another of the things that to me show the humorous differences between heli and fixed wing piloting.
The other strange one to me was doing all of my Comm exams based on a King Air 200.
Really goes to show that in todays world it is all about ticking a box that makes a computer happy no matter how non sensical the situation is.