I have a personal anecdote about this.
I inadvertently experienced a near accident after taking control from a student in the hover at SY (Gazelle, 1984), even though I was used to flying from the left seat.
Bloggs was in the low level nav phase and had a number of maps to deal with. Approaching the departure point (south point, I'll never forget) he realised he had all his maps in the wrong order. He asked me to take control in the hover, which I did. The collective friction was on far too hard. As those familiar with the Gazelle will know, the friction is a tubular control on the right hand collective, so I changed hands to adjust it.
As I unwound the friction, the collective dropped down an inch or so and the Gazelle descended. As I tried to arrest the descent, the world suddenly went a little pear shaped. Why?
Brain says: "We're descending" and sends the usual message to the
left hand, i.e.: "Raise the collective".
Unfortunately the left hand was on the cyclic and responded by moving the collective rearwards.
Gazelle now moves backwards (still descending, too).
Brain responds by sending usual message to right hand, i.e. "Move the cyclic forwards". Unfortunately the right hand is still on the collective but still responds by lowering it.
Descent rate rapidly increases!
Brain says: "We're descending" and sends usual message to left hand "raise collective!"
It's easy in retrospect to see where this is going.....
For a few microseconds it felt that the flying controls had completely failed! Thankfully my personal survival gyro suddenly re-erected and I took control from myself. I sorted it out by pulling up hard on the right hand collective with my right hand. We shot backwards and upwards over the fence to the east of the departure point, which caused comments from both my student and from ATC. I went forward and down back to the hover and gave my student control. He was able to make a better job of the hover than myself so I allowed him to continue.
After the sortie I went to see the acting Sqn Cdr (a fellow QHI, slightly more senior than I) and tried to explain what had just happened. The point of my "fronting up" to him was so that the word could be spread around, to help prevent anyone else getting caught out by this "gotcha", which had never been pointed out to me (certainly wasn't done on the CFS course back then).
All he could do was to chastise me. I came out of his office feeling like an idiot. In retrospect I should have put in an incident report.
Three weeks later, this same acting Sqn Cdr went out on a solo GH sortie from the left hand seat (which incidentally was against regulations....).
At Chetwynd he changed hands to adjust the collective friction in the hover. He hit the ground hard, downwards and backwards and franged the tail!
You can imagine, I was really sympathetic about this and didn't go straight up to him and say "TOLD YOU SO!" .........
After that accident, which apparently came as a total surprise to him,
, all QHIs under training were taken to the high hover and made to swap hands on the controls. Many that I spoke to afterwards said that they would not have coped with a recovery from the almost inevitable ensuing descent, the first time they experienced this situation.
I put my own recovery from my incident down to being strongly ambidextrous, with the reactions of a startled ferret in those days. (I'm still ambidextrous....but as for the reactions...... Well, I did say it was back in 1984).
