I can understand how low visibility will cause a crash during landing or take off. I can also understand how it could lead to collisions with tall structures like masts and trees. However, in many of these cases it doesn’t seem like they collided with anything. They seem to drop out of the sky “due to low visibility”.
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No one here has said it yet but flying a helicopter straight and level is incredibly difficult and requires constant minute adjustments to the stick and collective. Compare to a fixed wing aircraft where if you’re trimmed correctly, you can let go of the controls and the plane will fly pretty much straight and level indefinitely.
Plenty of people wash out of helicopter training because they can’t get the feel for it.
If you lose your visual reference, you quickly can start over correcting for what your inner ear is feeling which is unlikely to be 100% accurate. IFR helicopter flying is a thing, but it’s adding another huge mental load to the already high mental load of just keeping the thing in the air. Plenty of heli pilots don’t have IFR training because realistically you should only fly a helicopter in good weather.
Also, this is the reason for the floor windscreens to see out the bottom of the aircraft. You pretty much need a visual reference to get the thing of on the ground in one piece every time.
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