I posted this on rec.aviation.rotorcraft back about 4 years ago, and found it in a search yesterday. It says how I feel:
Mara,
I've been squeezing the cyclic since 1968, and its always been a gas. The
typical helicopter job matches the typical airplane job in hours and pay,
except for the major airlines, where ALPO (did I spell that right?) somehow
got the world to believe that an airline pilot is like a brain surgeon, but
with better sex life.
I think the typical helo driver has to think more, has to work more at the
controls, and has to expose himself to more hazardous situations to make a
living. Every airplane lands on the same runway (bush pilots excepted) and
every helicopter pilot is endangered by the fact that all it takes to design a
heliport is the ability to spell "H".
How many airline pilots would put up with a telephone pole exactly in line
with final? What airline would allow its operations to land long, over the
high tension lines?
We earn our pay by being able to do the un-usual, which is why the job needs a
helicopter to begin with. We have a saying in the Sikorsky pilots office, "If
the place needs helicopters, it isn't worth visiting." We earn our pay
figuring it out on short final, going into rough country where the Wx Channel
is the best we've got and landing on platforms at night with rain on the
bubble and nothing to look at but the platform, because the horizon took the
nght off.
Read what the pros - Bob Barbanes, Micbloo, Flyinrock, Butch Grafton and 180
Walt, for example - have to say about this job. I think in 50 years, when all
the flying transport is done with microchips and lasers at the stick, they'll
tell tales about the helicopter folks who kept the greasy side down during hot
insertions, and who brought out the wounded, or pulled crews off the rigs when
the hurricane had started to make white froth, or who winched up scared
sailors from crippled freighters, or who landed beside icy highways to whisk
injured kids to surgery in minutes.
I've landed next to rushing streams in the Phillipines where monkeys in the
trees laughed at me, and I've tossed rocks off needle-thin spires that no
human has ever climbed, and I've put my aircraft's belly into the water to
save some poor soul who jumped from a bridge,and I could have done none of
these things in an airplane!
I'd puke if I had to walk into a terminal wth a Jepp case, climb into a big
aluminum bus and drive down highway Victor boring!
If you can't do what you enjoy for a living, you're already dead.
Nick Lappos
It it can't hover, it really doesn't fly, does it?