As soon as you said that I knew you’d never been in a Robinson
It’s also possible ol’ Igor just like things set up that way. Wouldn’t be the first time an arrangement of stuff arises from arbritrary decisions, or the whims of one individual.
So… what, the left handed need not apply?
IANHP, but I routinely switch stick and throttle hands depending on the airplane, and I can work the controls/avionics pretty much equally well with either hand. And I’m not that great shakes a pilot, strictly average in ability.
Also - what about rotor CFI’s? If they’re instructing in something like an R-22 then their hand positions are reversed. Apparently this is not a problem…?
Handedness doesn’t really apply. You just fly a heli with your right hand, much like you (or I do, anyway) fly a Cessna with my left.
As far as instruction goes, the IP has a collective to his or her left, just like the student does; so the cyclic is in the IP’s right hand and the collective in his (if I may switch from PC to regular grammar) left. However he must switch hands to reach the console.
Incidentally, for those who don’t know about weight-and-balance: In a fixed-wing aircraft the pilot loads the aircraft so that it balances fore-and-aft. In helicopters the pilot must also figure the lateral weight-and-balance, and must take into account the longitudinal and lateral movement of the CG as fuel is burned.
Here is a page that talks about fixed-wing weight-and-balance.
Sometimes during the boring times of going to and from work in our patrol aircrat, if the conditions were good enough we would trim to such a degree of balance that we could fly straight and level and make gentle turns and climbs and decents with just slight body movements, sometimes just a head nod would do.