In Desert Combat (DC), the choppers are quite hard to land properly*, even on dry land, much less a moving carrier. Just flying around can be difficult if you lose track of the center point for your controls. I would hope that flying a real helicopter would be easier, or at least more intuitive.
Part of the problem is that, like most FPS games, you don’t have much depth perception to know how far away the ground is. In addition, the chopper controls in DC are on the keyboard, which is somewhat suboptimal. You have the arrow keys, which control your cyclic (I hope I’m getting this right, steering about the main rotor), and the forward back keys control the collective (up/down). The strafe keys control your rotation the way pedals would (spin on axis). The problem here is that they don’t auto center, and since they’re keys, it’s hard to tell when you’re centered. So when trying to land it’s easy to wind up oversteering and doing exactly what Incubus was talking about.
Quite frequently you’ll see choppers flying along apparently fine, and then the pilot will get distracted or have network latency problems and suddenly the thing is upside down spinning into the ground.
*for most people. I’m sure someone will be along shortly and say “I can do it every time!” That’s just super.