I'm certainly not going to make any friends here but I'll admit to not liking flying the Robbie very much
....all kinds of placards of "Don't Push Here" and "Don't Pull There" and a rotor brake that looks disturbingly like the chain I use to pull on and off my basement lights, and a foamy cyclic grip that wouldn't be found on the cheapest kid's bike.
I've flown Bell 47's with various engines, wood blades as well as the metal ones, Hughes 300's and 500's, all the 206's (A,B,L,L-1,L-4), 205's, 222's, S-76's and 61's, but the only one I never really liked was the Robbie. And I gave it a good go too, a full fire season with water bucketing and slinging. No, it never quit on me as some of the others on my licence have done, and no, there wasn't grease to clean off the head after every flight, and actually, things tended to work as intended and there was very little maintenance required, and actually, it was kinda fun to fly after I got used to it, and when my rather over-inflated ego adapted to the many calls over the radio like "Can you sling a toaster over from camp 4?", I'd have to admit, it's actually a pretty good little helicopter.
But I still didn't like it.
