One area guys that everyone seems to forget about is the air to air photography. I spend most of my time doing that and there are always a number of factors when doing this. I have had good experiences and bad experiences.
A lof of people will say mil trained pilots are better at it than civvy. Well in some cases I have found the opposite. More often than not it is the individual and not the service as a whole that is the contributing factor. The ones that have scared me is the pilot who thinks he is better at it than he really is, wanting to get right in very very close for that special shot. Many times I have had to tell them to back off, in one case the subject aircraft had his blades overlapping the photoship and didnt even realise it.
Its a very steep learning curve, air to air photography. Utmost faith in both pilots.
Heli Ops