Originally Posted by
aa777888
Low time Robbie guy here. If you haven't tried it, it's not nearly as difficult as you think. For a commercial rating you need 5 hours under the hood or in an approved simulator. I did over half my time in an R44, at night just to minimize potential external cues. While more difficult than in a fixed wing, I did not by any means find it impossible, and was able to fly around reasonably well at the direction of my instructor, even shooting a couple of ersatz approaches (not ILS).
aa777888 - Strongly agree with crab - it's simply not the same thing. Don't think we're all picking on you, it's just this conversation resonates with a lot of us.
It's amazing how good your brain is at picking up little cues that you don't realize you're seeing. I've been flying and teaching in Robbies and Bells for 30 years and it's really scary to hear a low time guy say what you just said. In fact, I've complained that the 5 hours of IFR training for the commercial is counter productive for just this reason. What you should be learning is that if you go inadvertent IMC (especially at night) in a VFR helicopter... chances are very good that you are not going to survive the encounter. At night you probably have 15 seconds before you lose control. The 5 hours of hood training is just enough to make people overconfident. For my first 10 years of flying R22s I just assumed that if I went IMC I would die. It kept me safe, thinking that way.
I was training someone in an R44 for the commercial not too long ago and by the end of the 5 hours of hood time he was getting pretty cocky. I kept telling him that actual IMC isn't at all the same. You could tell he was pretty skeptical. I took him out over the water for an ILS and he was all over the sky as soon as he crossed the beach. It's actually pretty darn uncomfortable in a teetering system to be all over the sky (I'm thinking low gee) the way we were that day. It's not that he was trying to cheat... you just can't help it. Your brain is amazing at finding cues to what the aircraft is doing when you're wearing a hood.
Other story is the first time I flew IMC. I had been a CFII for a couple years, probably had a couple hundred hours of hood time, and I went out with my buddy in the SPIFR B206L3 I still fly. I think I gave him a pretty bad scare. For the first 10 minutes it was all I could do to keep the dirty side down. After a few minutes he says "how about we turn the autopilot on for a few minutes?". I gratefully did. I was shocked at how different it was from flying under the hood.
So, like crab says, don't think that when you enter IMC by mistake it's going to be anything like when you're under the hood (even at night). And, with a VFR R44 like the pilot in this video was flying, the attitude indicator looks tiny because it's further away than with an IFR panel. And, like several people said, there's a huge difference between going IMC as planned vs by mistake.
I only watched the short video, and of course I knew it was going to be bad but when the camera gave the out-the-front view, like someone else said: I knew they were toast.
Someone else mentioned the stress of doing weddings. Whenever I do weddings or Santa deliveries, I require they have a car standing by. That way I can always abort and they can still get to the function, even if a few minutes late. Takes a lot of stress off the decision making when you can say "hey, the worst case scenario is that they just take the limo".