Bob, it gets down to an issue of trust. To wit: Do you trust your aircraft to get you to Point B? Most helicopter pilots don’t. Either consciously or sub-consciously, many helicopter pilots have a nagging feeling of dread that a catastrophic failure of some sort will occur which will require them to be on the ground RIGHTFRIGGIN’ NOW! And so they fly low, as SASless notes. They don’t want to be “way up there” when Something Bad happens.
I’m no Sigmund Freud, but I think I know why. Most helicopter pilots are pretty untrustworthy people. There, I said it. And it’s true. If you’ve met many of them you can vouch for this on your own. You can’t trust a helicopter pilot to tell you the time of day, unfortunately. Some will vehemently pretend to deny this, but again, stick around this industry for a while and you’ll see what I mean.
Hand and hand with this personality “quirk” is the fact that most helicopter pilots don’t trust anything or anybody. This lack of trust explains why so many helicopter pilots are fearful, paranoid atheists. (Want to know how paranoid a helicopter pilot is? Just ask him about politics - then stand back!)
Helicopter pilots feel that they are absolutely in charge of their own destiny, and giving up even one small iota of that control is totally unacceptable and abhorrent. Helicopter pilots don’t trust the maintenance guys and they certainly don’t trust their machines, heavens no! Thus, that helpless feeling of being up high in a helicopter when the poop hits the fan is utterly intolerable; too much for them to bear.
They’ll rationalize it. They’ll worry, “What if you get a chip light?” Or, “What if you lose all your transmission oil?” Or, “What if the engine catches on fire?” Or, "What if the rotor blades fly off?" Because in their mind (either the front or back of their mind), every time they fly all of those things are imminent. They’ll tell you, “Oh, the scenery is so much better down low!” But that’s just a mask to hide their real fear. And yes, it’s fear.
Like you, I fly airplanes too. When I’m flying along up high in a single-engine airplane I sometimes wonder to myself, “Gee, what if the engine caught on fire? How fast could I get ‘er down before my feet burned off?” The answer to that could be troubling. But then I ask myself, “...And how likely is that to happen?” The answer is: Not very. So I relax and have myself a sandwich.
There are a number of emergencies that might cause a typical helicopter pilot to want to be on the ground pretty quickly. There’s always the dreaded chip-light (“LAND IMMEDIATELY!!!) that makes a lot of pilots panic. There are also a lot of spinny things (bearings and linkages and such) in our aircraft that can come askew. But aside from in-flight fire, the worst-case scenario is probably a total loss of transmission oil. Yikes! Does that ever happen??
Well…yeah. In 2009 this actually did happen to the crew of a Sikorsky S-92 that was cruising along eastbound off the coast of Canada at 9,000 feet. The crew reversed course, descended to 800 feet and headed toward land. They erroneously thought (due to their knowledge of aircraft certification regulations) that they had at least 30 minutes of “run-dry” capability in their transmission. That’s what the rules call for. But there is a loophole (isn’t there always?).
What they didn’t know, but what Sikorsky did know (but didn’t tell anyone) is that with no trans juice at all the S-92 transmission would last about nine minutes before it did its impersonation of a hand grenade. And, wouldn’t you know it, about nine minutes after the transmission pressure went to zero in that S-92 off the Canadian coast, the transmission came apart. The pilots lost control and the helicopter crashed into the sea. Of the 18 people on board, only one survived.
So the typical helicopter pilot would point excitedly to this event and say, “See?! I told ya so! Bad **** happens!”
The fact is, stuff like that RARELY happens. And even if the S-92 had been up at 10,000 feet when the transmission lost all its oil, the crew still could have initiated a 1500 fpm descent and landed safely if they actually followed the emergency procedures set out in their RFM (although in the case referenced above they did not). But don’t tell that to a paranoid helicopter pilot who’s so worried about getting an engine chip light that he feels uncomfortable and squirms when he gets above 1,000 feet.
Like a few of the guys on this board, I’ve been flying for a living for over 30 years and I’ve got a logbook full of hours, mostly in single-engine helicopters. And me, I fly high. It’s cooler up there, often smoother, and sometimes you can find a ripping tailwind. Plus, I like the view from altitude. If I were that distrustful of my equipment…if I were that paranoid…that afraid of Something Bad happening to my helicopter, I just could not fly it at all - not at any altitude! But see, I also have faith. Faith in the designers, faith in the builders, and faith in the maintainers. Without that faith, I doubt I could even climb into one of these crazy contraptions in the first place.
If the pilot with whom you are ferrying that helicopter is a “typical”helicopter pilot, I’ll bet that you’ll likely spend the whole trip dogging along down at 1,000’ agl. Or less. If that happens, you’ll know some other things about him too...perhaps things that you'd rather not know.