'Course it does Whirls! You just drink in the wrong places ;)

By "wrong places", I suppose you mean "Norfolk"! :}

Cheers

Whirls

Yes! :ok:

And sadly enough, she :} looks very familiar... :hmm:

Ahh. how refreshing to hear some anti-plank comebacks, I will commit some of these to mind, especially the "Systems Administrator" one, ironically that's what I did before taking up flying! So my response is now going to be...

"Why on earth would I want to fly fixed wing, I don't want to go back to being a systems adminstrator, want to be a pilot!"

Thanks for the replies guys, made me chuckle!

Been there, went to OAT some years ago and had a good poking from plank heads. Out of approx 200 students, only 2-3 of us were REAL pilots. After the first fifty hours all they did was fly in straight lines for 28 mins then take up a heading of 020 degs for another 18 mins at 2500'. They did that for a year gearing up for there IR. Mean while I was hoofing around a "! feet for a hour at a time chasing foxes and rabbits and hiding behind hedges etc having a fecking ball. Believe me, after a couple of months they were all green with jealousy and they were bored witless. As 332 says, I now earn the same as top end jet pilots but only work half the year, I'm tucked up in my own pit every night and fly fairly social hours and if I want to travel, the opportunity is also there. True, we fly for most of the time in straight lines with George taking up the slack but there is allot more hands on the controls flying.

By the way, two of the plank pilots from oat when I was there are now Capts in offshore ops and have NEVER looked back at there dark days as fixed wing idiots. Keep your chin high and shoulders back

p.s ask them to hover when they are on short finals.

I was fortunate enough to attend the Sergei Sikorsky Handley Page lecture at the RAeS in London the other week and he came out with the following when talking about the differences between helicopters and fixed wing aircraft.

“In a plane you have to land before you can stop. In a helicopter you can stop before you land” or something to that effect but it did make me smile.:}

When the RAAF still had helicopters, half the fixed wing dicks wanted to fly them but didn't get posted there.
We had a great non-politically-correct song that went through most of the types in service and basically said if you couldn't hover, you were a poof.
(I did about half my time on planks so I guess I'm also bagging myself here in part, but it's all in the name of good-natured ribbing, so no offence to anyone, particularly gays, except those fixed-wing plonkers of course).

It was to the tune of 'The Road to Gundagai' and had numerous verses along the lines of "Then there's the trashies, they are rather camp, but we know where they take it - they take it up the ramp!" or
"Then there's the triple ones with their moving wing, but we know where they take it 'cause they don't complete the swing!" etc. etc, leading to a rousing chorus of "If your wings don't rotate then you take it up the date, we are the (insert squadron name here) ... "

Seriously though, the main line of defence is that most fixed wing drivers would love to have a go at flying a helicopter, we know it and they know it, and unless they're doing low level aerobatics or something, then they're just drilling along from A to B pulling their puds.
Caution - fighting words!

2 comments you can use...
 

1. Fixed wing pilots are only half trained. Rotary wing pilots for FULLY trained.
2. Fixed wings are lazy. They just sit there do no work - a helicopter wing (rotor blade) does heaps of work, just watch it....

We were all military trained and so all had started on fixed wing. One guys comment was always "Well we started on fixed wing, but then graduated to helicopters."

I've spent the last 6 years converting pilots on to types that use an FMS. When faced with students nervous at the prospect of using this new fangled gadget, I've tried to reassure them by saying "don't worry, it can't be that difficult to use: it was designed for FW pilots!" :ok:

As AOTW said, the RAAF had a lot of re-treads, with helo pilots going off to stuck-wing, and vice versa.

One chopper-pilot-turned-knucklehead said,

"Flying a helicopter is like m@sturbating - it is a heck of a lot of fun, but we prefer to do it when none of our fighter mates are watching, and we never admit to liking it!":ooh:

Even the Wright brothers saw that they were not made of the right stuff to be messing with helicopters.

Like all novices (in our childhood), we began with the helicopter but soon saw it had no future and dropped it.
Wilbur Wright

Along with the Stop then Land Vs Land then Stop argument is the other end of the flight. What idiot would want to hurtle along the tarmac at 120 kts and then pull up into the sky without being certain that the flying controls were fully servicable. Wise men check them out in a low hover.