An aside. I used to be in the Colorado Ground Search and rescue team. It was part of the Civil Air Patrol. We got to do some training with Chinooks. Dropped out of the belly on a winch from 60 feet. Jungle penetrator ‘seat’.
It’s very windy 
We were waiting in an open field to get picked up when the Chinook (CH-47) came in and buzzed us at about 150 feet AGL and 70 miles per hour. God that’s an old bird, but very, very impressive.
I haven’t heard that story, so I can’t know what the reviewers actually said. But I think a fixed-wing pilot can fly a flying helicopter from Point A to Point B without crashing… until the end. I was able to fly straight-and-level with no rotorcraft experience. Had I been clued in to the sensitivity of the controls, I think I could have flown to a specific destination. Any ‘landing’ would have been a crash.
There are three types of rotors: Semi-rigid, fully-articulated, and rigid.
A semi-rigid rotor has two blades and is hinged in the middle. This hinge is called the ‘teeter hinge’ (‘flapping hinge’) because the blades move up and down as a unit, like a teeter-totter. There is also the ‘feathering hinge’ that allows the blades to change pitch.
A fully-articulated rotor has more than two blades. They have a flapping hinge that allows the blades to move up and down, and feathering hinges to allow the blades to change pitch. They also have a ‘lead-lag hinge’. As the rotor blades flap up, their tips are closer to the center of rotation than the tips of the blades that are not flapping up. Since the tips are closer to the middle, Coriolis Effect (or Conservation of Momentum; but I’m going with what I was taught) makes them want to move faster. The lead-lag hinges allow the blades to move forward while they are flapped up, and backward when they are not. If the blades were not allowed to ‘hunt’, then the faster one would be trying to accelerate the slower ones and the slower ones would be trying to negatively accelerate the faster ones. Lead-lag hinges are not needed on semi-rigid rotors because those blades flap as a unit.
A rigid rotor has more than two blades and only the feathering hinge. (No reason there couldn’t be a two-blade rigid-rotor helicopter, but I don’t know of one.) Lead-lag and flapping are handled by the flexibility of the blades themselves. IIRC, rigid rotors were first put into use in the early-'70s; but I’m sure they must have at least been tested in the '60s. Rigid rotors are simpler than the other systems, and they should make the helicopter more responsive. I don’t see how they would be easier to fly. But I’ve never flown one, so I can’t tell you.
The first thing they’ll tell you about helicopters is ‘Helicopters are inherently unstable.’ The second thing is ‘Helicopters fly differently from airplanes.’
Let me pick a nit on terminology. In a helicopter, the joystick is called the ‘cyclic control’. The ‘collective lever’ is the one next to the seat. The collective lever changes the pitch of all main rotor blades by the same amount at the same time – i.e., collectively. The cyclic lever changes the pitch of each blade a different amount, depending on that blade’s position in its rotation (or cycle). The cyclic is the one you push forward and move side-to-side like the joystick (or yoke) in an airplane. The collective makes you go up or down.
You do indeed push the nose down in a helicopter to go forward. Actually, you’re tilting the rotor disc forward and the pendulum-like fuselage goes along; but yeah. If you think about it, the elevators on an airplane control speed, and the throttle controls altitude too. But I digress. You are correct that when you change the lift vector from vertical, you need to add more power to compensate. In a helicopter, you do this by increasing the pitch of the blades with the collective lever. Of course that causes more drag on the blades, so you need to increase power. (This is mostly taken care of by the throttle correlator in a piston-powered helicopter.) Since you’ve increased power, you have to overcome more torque; so you add some left pedal (in an American helicopter). Unless it’s a hot day and you’re heavy, you don’t need to worry about the power the anti-torque rotor just stole. 
Robinsons got a bad rap for crashing, and special regulations were written for them. It seems there were a lot of airplane pilots who decided to learn to fly helicopters, and Robbos were the most popular trainers. So you had low-time helicopter pilots with (usually) lots of fixed-wing time that got messily dead. Some of these crashes were because pilots ran into things. Helicopters are allowed to fly lower than airplanes. Airplane pilots are going to fly over a canyon. Helicopter pilots like to fly through them. Unfortunately, there are really selfish negative vibe merchants who like to put things like power cables across canyons. An unwary pilot can hit them. Another area where former fixed-wing pilots can get into trouble is by trying to fly helicopters like airplanes.
Imagine you’re flying along, taking in the scenery, in your trusty Skyhawk. You’re not paying attention, and suddenly you notice you’re in a nose-high attitude and close to a stall. Quick! Push the yoke forward! Whew All is well. Now you’re a newly-minted rotorhead. Same thing. You’re not paying attention and your nose is too high. (‘Why am I slowing down?’) Or more likely, your Walter Mitty Robbinson becomes in your mind an Apache. Look at that canyon! Dive! Wheeeeeee! In any case, you’re nosing over suddenly. This can result in a negative-g situation. You ‘unload the rotors’. The fuselage is hanging like a pendulum, and the rotors no longer have this plumb bob holding them in check. Who knows which way the fuselage will swing? Who knows which way the rotor disc is going to want to go? This can result in mast-bumping, which is at least damaging to the structure. At worst, the rotor system can depart the aircraft. Or a blade might swing down and chop off your tail boom. Either of those cases will be at least mildly unpleasant. But only for some seconds; as you will promptly be immune from any more unpleasantness, care, or worry.
Nitpick: the Air Force hasn’t had Warrant Officers since 1980, when the last one (CWO4 Long) retired. The ranks were recommended for discontinuation years before that.
Tripler
“Real pilots”? That’s an entire other thread.
A supervisor I worked under at Edwards AFB had been a helicopter pilot. (He was also a member of The Society of Experimental Test Pilots.) He said once that pilot’s (insignia) wings should only have one wing on them until the pilot became a helicopter pilot.
Biggles could do it. “If you can fly a Sopwith Camel, you can fly anything.”
If you lasted 20 seconds and managed to get into forward motion, you’d have a good chance of lasting until you tried to land.
I admit my only experience is MS Flight Sim. My understanding from a number of friends who are pilots (both fixed and heli) is that MS Flight Sim is harder to fly than a real craft, with the obvious exception that since your life isn’t in danger, you’re more relaxed. But the response from the controls isn’t as immediate, and the latency makes it a lot less intuitive; your body has a harder time learning the necessary lessons. (Imagine learning to ride a bike where the response to any action came a quarter of a second later.)
In any case, with any of the helicopters I had in MSFS at the time – I think that was around 2005 – hovering was too hard for me to master. My only chance at a decent takeoff was to go up as fast as possible and shift into forward flight. Once in forward flight, the helis responded an awful lot like planes (assuming you had a good intellectual understanding of what the collective and cyclic controls do).
Bank left with a little left “rudder” and oboy, you turn left! Does it handle like a plane? uh no, but every plane is different, and it’s not that far outside the envelope, once you have a good bit of forward motion. Pull the stick (collective) back, and just like a plane, your nose comes up and you lose forward speed. Push it forward and the nose goes down and you gain forward speed. Left or right, it banks left or right.
The collective is a bit odder. If you see you’re losing altitude and your nose is in the right attitude, you need more collective (more lift). So you increase pitch. The odd part is that also turns you (to the left, IIRC). Compensate for that by what? Turning to the right using the foot pedals, much as you would on a plane. Of course, the plane has no collective, so you never need to do this for this reason. You do it for other reasons, the main one being that you thought you had the rudder centered but it isn’t. A pilot’s instincts for using the pedals should work remarkably well.
I admit the only way I could land was to land it much like a plane, but with lower forward speed (using more collective to get more lift at lower speeds) and then quickly flare and reduce collective to stop and sit down, for a bumpy landing. The right way, hovering and slowly settling down, was never in the cards for my dilettante derriere.
My hat’s off to all you helicopter pilots who learned to do the real thing! It’s an admirable skill. Even if I had the time and money to learn, I wouldn’t simply because I make enough mistakes in all my other hobbies. I don’t like the idea of combining “pilot” with “mistake”!
I did my post above before I’d seen your post. While I might seem to be contradicting, I’m not, at least, not intentionally. I did neglect to mention a very important caveat: a helicopter responds a lot like a plane, during forward flight, to MINOR adjustments.
My (silly, artificial, limited, and safe-in-my-armchair) experience is that whenever I did major adjustments on a helicopter, the world would start to spin around me, and it would only get worse after that. I would be very happy to be in my armchair.
Microsoft Flight Simulator X is great for airplanes…not so much for helicopters. I am an airplane pilot and I have a custom built simulator at my house based on it. Lockheed purchased the software rights to use it for their professional multi-axis trainers and testers. I have no problem with simulators that teach airmanship for airplanes but helicopters are a different story.
Lets’s repeat this again. Airplanes are inherently stable to a large degree but the level of stability depends on the model. That is both good and bad. You can take your hands off the controls completely for most planes and they will continue to fly in the same general orientation that you left them in. That is an excellent quality for a trainer or an airliner. It is a bad quality for a fighter or an aerobatic airplane because they need to flit around the sky on demand.
Helicopters are not like that. They are like bicycles or unicycles. Their tendency is always to crash and burn unless you actively prevent that through small but regular inputs. They will go into a fatal crash sequence in a few seconds or less if you take your hands off the controls.
I also tried to learn to fly a helicopter using MS Flight Simulator X and became somewhat proficient at it. It was difficult and I crashed many times but I learned to get them up in the air and land them somewhat near (a few yards) of where I intended them to be.
As it happens, my cousin owns one of the foremost helicopter touring companies in Colorado and I take my family out there every year. We always take a flight and he has let me take the controls a few times. I did fairly well but there is absolutely no way in hell that I could land where he does. His helipad is a concrete square only slightly larger than the helicopter itself adjacent to a canyon. He takes off and lands on it many times a day. The operations center where his family works is literally less than 100 feet (probably closer to 60) from where he operates from. Any mistake could wipe out the whole building with a rotor strike.
I repeat, there is no way that a first-timer could do anything near that. It doesn’t take superhuman skill but it does require lots of practice to build up the motor skills needed to even land a helicopter at all. They are all just inherently unstable machines with giant rotating blades ready to destroy themselves and anything around them with even a moments distraction.
A bicycle will roll along quite nicely ‘in the same general orientation’ until its speed deteriorates. I can only assume a unicycle won’t. As for taking your hands off: Don’t. Not in an R22 or Hughes/Schweizer 300. I did see some footage (on TV, I think) showing a test flight of a new R44, and it flew hands-off. It surprised me.
There used to be a requirement, before I got my license, that an examinee hover within a 20-foot (I think) circle to pass the checkride. I was told that this requirement was eliminated because you have to be able to hover over a spot in order to land anyway. Landing in confined areas is something helicopters are especially good at.
At least one person had to learn without an instructor. Helicopter or fixed wing or float plane or …
I know two different people that their first time in a real airplane of any kind, they were driving. Went more than a few miles and landed safely.
Need define ‘fly.’
Fixed wing pilot got helicopter off the ground, moved it some hundreds of yards and got it back on the ground with no damage. Did he fly it or is their some special thing you have to do that means you flew something?
Have you gone skydiving if you used a static line, buddy system, D ring, hand release?
Is it common? Not really but it is doable.
Military pilots do not have special wiffle dust. They do have access to machines that a civilian will never have. They do not have to pay extra for fuel, rental, instruction over & above their normal job of marching in rows that the civilians have to do. ( sarcasm ) Just by being in the military does not make them better. But they do get to play with fun toys.
Always remember & never forget that to make absolute statements about human capabilities is usually a way to stub your toe.
It was a money/manpower decision. During the 1950s, after Korea, some forward thinking Army Aviator wondered why they needed a commissioned officer (as an aerial taxi driver) to fly a $15,000 H-13 when they had sergeants commanding $75,000 tanks and it’s crew. If you can pass the physical and flight school, having a college degree and a commission or not makes no difference in your ability to fly a helo. And most second or first johns fresh out of flight school are smart enough to understand why they’re sitting in the right seat while a CWO-4 with 5,000 hours is sitting in the left. And if they can’t figure it out, there’s a Maj or LtC to explain it to them in words they can understand.
Oh, between the World Wars, there were Flying Sergeants/Chiefs. They were generally aviation mechanics who picked up some bootleg stick time and impressed their officers enough to get official training and rated. Again, it saved money.
Do modern helicopters not have a computer-stabilized mode?
It sounds like it would be straightforward to build a flight control system that uses software monitoring the state of the helicopter. You’d fly it in this mode using “dumbed down” flight controls that basically allow you to choose the direction you want to fly in and which way to rotate the bird. In this mode, you would not be permitted to make violent maneuvers that would cause unexpected behavior, and if you did get in such a situation, the control system would take over automatically to bring you back to stable flight.
On the one hand, software can fail and sensors can glitch out, but on the other hand, modern avionics are generally less likely to fail than trained human pilots, at least when they assign blame for crashes.
So Mr. 007 would jump into this high tech helicopter, hit the big red “start” button that automatically executes the startup sequence for current environmental conditions, and he’d be ready to escape the bad guys.
Of course, cold war era computers, especially the ones the Soviets had, were too large and bulky…
In the late 1980s I had the pleasure of taking a spin in a Seahawk simulator at the naval base in San Diego. The hydraulics were turned off, so that I didn’t hurt myself. Anyway, I flew the chopper for a minute or so once the bird was in the air and the controls were handed to me, but landing was impossible. I crashed both times I tried to land.
Oh GOD no.
Hovering is one of the hardest things to get a helicopter to do.
I have heard it described as trying to stand on top of a beach ball: the thing keeps trying to move sideways or forwards or back.
That said, it is not implausible for a military pilot, even one who really only flies planes, to have a little experience with helicopters too.
Last I knew (1980s), that was how the US military did it.
I’m not sure I would have flown with that first guy. Actually, five years is a pretty enviable safety record, under the circumstances.
When I was in high school, roughly 25 years ago, the popular wisdom was that it was impossible to build an autopilot for helicopters. As others have noted, it requires constant minute control inputs, and … have you seen recent attempts at autonomous motorcycles? The one that start to lean one way, the overcorrect, and go a few dozen feet before falling over? Remember what folks here said about trainee helicopter pilots having the same problem?
That said, a friend gave me a catalog of Search and Rescue helicopters and equipment from the mid 1990s, and it features autopilot systems that can hover or fly a pre-programmed search pattern, so both pilot and co-pilot can be watching the ground.
Fixed-wing aircraft with relaxed stability also require constant minute control inputs (by the computer). It can’t be that different.