What about helis?
When I did my PPL(H) we sometimes popped over to a friendly local scrap metal dealer, who happened to have a field adjacent to his property, with some reasonably high trees surrounding it. He had given permission for us to land, so we did all manner of approaches to the field from different directions. On arrival we had to practice sloping ground landings, turns around the tail rotor, towering take-offs and all that good stuff. Are we saying that that was all illegal if we touched the skids?
Boffo