I am on board with Hummingfrog, clearly the helicopter doesn't know or care if it's into wind or downwind, it's only interested in the relative wind, I think there are 3 points of interest here.
1) it's a matter of how it looks visually, into wind you are often moving backwards over the ground in order to get a good rate of descent in the incipient stage, whereas downwind you are still moving forward over the ground at the same point and that feels more normal .
2) while recovery clearly takes the same time, you are not so well placed downwind at the bottom of the recovery much nearer the ground if you run into a problem that may require an autorotation and engine off landing.
3) in my experience people are often shown the wrong technique for minimum height loss recovery, in particular they do not level the ship as they recover the airspeed through 30kts and as they pull power with the nose still down they accelerate the descent and lose far more height than they would otherwise.
Min 2000ft height is a good starting point I think with a student.
Last edited by Camp Freddie; 28th Jun 2012 at 22:10.