Why is piloting a helicopter considered more challenging, despite not requiring much space to take off and land and being able to stabilize in the air and stand still?
In: Engineering
In a plane you’re managing your craft’s pitch, roll and yaw using a hand control and pedals, which is already a fair bit. (Also throttle, trim, fuel mix and flaps, but you can go a while not touching those.)
In a helicopter you have all that, and you can also control the ‘collective’, which is the pitch of the rotor blades, and you might be controlling the power to the tail rotor. So what you’re doing is a superset of what a plane pilot’s doing. Helicopters are very capable, as you point out, but one price for that is the pilot’s doing a lot more work to manage those extra variables.
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