Why did you get it to start with? Sincerely curious, not being a jerk (that I'm aware of).
That said, from my own perspective, y'know, "nobody gets out alive". It's not at the top of the "stuff to do" list, but it's not at the bottom, either.
When I started flying helicopters i was young, single and the gibill was paying for it all, so i was all excited about it and didn't know any better. Personally don't have a lot of experience flying them just enough to get the commercial and instrument, about 200 hours total time all in robinsons r22 and r44.
The risk vs reward financially and career wise to make it worth while wasn't there. It was either work as a cfi or go fly tours and I've heard too many stories from pilots I've known to try doing that. As an example one tour operator wouldn't fix the fly wheel of the R44 they had so sometimes after shutdown, the teeth wouldn't line up with the starter so the pilot would have to tension the belts and turn the transmission by hand to turn the engine over to get the teeth on the flywheel to line up with the starter. Now its the pilots fault for accepting this, but if you don't accept it they will just fire you and get some other low time guy to do it. To many operators cutting corners and you don't know which corners they've cut from the outside looking in.
Then robinson with not making internal fuel bladders on their helicopters a mandatory AD or service bulletin and getting rid of documents showing that they had a problem and knew about the problem so there wasn't evidence during a lawsuit. They would follow the law as far as to what they would have to hold onto but as soon as the time expired then would get rid of those records. I think now all robinsons new and old have to have the bladders installed. 60 minute Australia did a great piece on them about how pilots would land the helicopter just to have it turn over and the fuel tanks rupture causing a fire.
The utility of a helicopter is just limited to areas/things an airplane just can't do and wealthy people use them just to cut travel time. Now i realize that is what all forms of air travel do, but there as to be some limits to it.
I remember going to off airport helipads that were on a cliff next to a ravine next to powerlines that we would flyover to land or take off to me now looking back i would consider reckless. Taking off gresham airport and landing downtown portland on a building that had a heliport just because we could. I mean if we lost our engine we would potentially end up killing ourselves and random people on the ground. we could have just got the fbo car drove there.
A lot of places that you can take a helicopter into could be done with a tail wheel stol airplane.
You don't have many options say on a pinnacle when your engine quits not enough outs at critical phases of flight like takeoff and landing. My approaches were completely different when i was flying the pattern to land vs when i was flying the pattern to practice engine out auto rotate procedures. On a normal pattern it would be 1000ft downwind, 750ft crosswind, 500ft final, but on practice autos we would be at 800-1000ft final. The way we were practicing wasn't the way we would fly them.
I've known more pilots who have died flying airplanes than helicopters, but i've also known way more pilots that fly airplanes over helicopters. I had other things to say but they've escaped me at the moment.
