Helicopter pilot

Flying a helicopter as a pilot is the ultimate experience of freedom. You can fly in every direction; reverse, forwards, sideways, hang still in the air (hovering) and with some machines you can even fly a looping!

Learning to hover is one of the most difficult things to learn. After you just learned to hover it will take quite some experience still to hover steadily for more than a second. To fly with a slingload like I am doing on the picture to the right, you need to hover quite neatly because every movement of the helicopter is escalated by the sling beneath the helicopter.

To learn to fly a helicopter is not easy but everyone can learn it. A helicopter's natural instability means two things: 1. you can do (nearly) anything with is but 2. you have to keep manipulating the controls all the time to keep the machine in balance. You can take your hands off a well-trimmed aeroplane and it will fly straight and level but cannot do this with a helicopter!

The helicopter is controlled with both your hands and feet. With your right hand you steer the fuselage of the helicopter down/ up and bank it left/ right (and all combinations of two), with your left hand you pull/push the collective which makes the helicopter go up/down and, in conjuction with the right hand, you set the machine's speed. With your feet you move the helicopter around it's vertical axis.

If you would like to see a more elaborate explanation of the workings of the helicopter you can send me an e-mail, I will put it on the website if there is enough demand for it.

I was trained as a fixed wing aviator as well as helicopter pilot but nowadays I only fly helicopters.I fly VFR (visual reference) and IFR (on instruments). You can see me here on a flight to the Zandvoort racing circuit in The Netherlands. Here you can see me flying IFR on a training flight for my instrument rating.

A helicopter I will never forget it the Bell47: it was produced between 1946 and 1974, I was three years old when the last ones left the factory!

The most sexy helicopter I flew up to now is the Agusta109 (although the EC145 is was nice too). It was a very fast helicopter which was also for fire fighting and search and rescue missions, on the picture you see the radio's for the emergency services (next to the front seats).

I fly Robinson R44 helicopters in The Netherlands. It is an alround performer, you can click here for some pictures. I fly all kinds of missions with this machine ranging from stunt, VIP, film-/ photoflights to joyflights.

The nice thing of joyflights is that passengers are always very happy to go for a fly which makes my working environment a very positively charged one. The views from the helicopter are simply fantastic, to see the world beneath you, the clouds and different kinds of weather never fails to impress. When I tell people I used to fly in Australia some people tell me they think that the weather in Australia is always fair but it is not. The tropical thunderstorms there can last hours. Click here to see one of the "bad weather" clouds found in Australia.

At the moment of writing I am developing a different way of coaching using helicopters and fixed wing aircraft as a coaching platform, more on this beginning next year!

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