SFHeliguy
I wish i had a bunch of money
you are are right and there is a total picture like any job.
The low level flying is no big deal, most of the time you are around 200 ft agl and travelling at around 50 knots but occasionaly you have to place the machine in a certain position to make the stock do what you want.
You have to be able to be at this critical point with speed and acuracy ASAP.
The big thing is knowing where this CP is and it takes a lot of training to recognise that, the other thing is being able to handle the machine skilfully enougn to achieve the CP.
To give you an idea a usual muster in north australia could be with 2500 head of cattle in a paddock that is 25 kms wide and 30 kms long thats if there is a fence. There would be 1 or 2 helicopters and a stock camp of around 7 men mounted on horses and bikes. The cattle would be worth about $1,000,000 and are a valuable asset that have to be got in and processed ie. some would go to market and some branded , that sort of thing. If the pilot makes a bad decision it is possible to lose all the cattle back into the paddock and really wreck your day. If this should happen it costs a lot of money, the calves get mismothered, the cattle get stuffed up and wont respond to the helicopter the next muster. you would have to leave that muster for at least 2 weeks to give the cattle time to settle down before you could try again and your success rate would not be so hot. A muster like this can take 12 hours of chopper time at $400.00 ph, 7 men at $200.00 per day each.
May not be be big figures in the rest of the world but everything is relative.
Competion is pretty fierce and if you stuff up the stations will very quickly get somene else. A fair few of them have done many thousands of hours as a passenger mustering and are able to recognise when things are going wrong, vise versa some cattle are pretty well unmusterable and need shooting so there are a lot of variables.
We like to start pilots off carefully if possible and get them as competent as we can.
300 hours would usually only take 3 or 4 months