Quindici:
As for flying from the left or the right seat, surely someone that takes as pragmatic-a-view as you claimed to in the earlier post would not see a difference between being sole manipulator of the controls from the left seat or from the right seat? Quality of the flying is equal.
Quite right! My point was exactly that. Left seat/right seat...flight time is flight time. What I was pointing out was that if the traffic watch pilot does not let you sit in the right seat, do the start, shut it down, pull the rotor brake, flip the switches...all that stuff, then you might as well be flying
anything else- it really has no significance that you're in a 206.
Furthermore, while the experience of driving around the L.A. basin is valuable in and of itself, you probably won't be doing high-GW/confined-area stuff, or pinnacle landings, or autos...so you better come to me SUPER-SHARP on Class B ops, radio procedures (monitoring more than one at a time), knowing how/where to look for traffic (the airborne kind), etc. I've flown with helicopter pilots who seemed to have very little awareness of fixed-wing patterns and habits.
Let me also point out that flying straight and level in a JR will tell you absolutely zilch about how it hovers (unless the pilot lets you do some hover work before and after each flight - which I doubt if the ship is stored on a dolly or platform). And believe me, there are those of us who can tell in an instant whether the applicant (supplicant?) next to us has ever picked up and hovered a 206 before.
So how valuable is this flight time? As I said, it depends on the individual. It depends on what YOU make of it. If a pilot came to me with such experience I would not be prejudiced against him, but I would expect a lot...a LOT. In fact, at the end of the day that experience might work against him, because if someone claimed to have X-amount of 206 time, I would be disinclined to accept the excuse, "I wasn't allowed to do that."
See what I mean?