I meant on what a heli pilot does exactly.
That's actually not so easy to answer, at least at my typing speed.
For example, taking someone through a usual day as a helicopter pilot.
Again, difficult to do - what is "usual"? I just came back from six weeks of living on a cruise ship in Vancouver Harbour. I didn't fly much during that time for various reasons, and I'm not going to discuss everything that we did do. There was a little bit of mountain flying training, because we had the necessary primary training aids, some VIP and other personnel transport missions, some air intercept training, some site famils before the op actually started, and a whole bunch of standing by.
When it was done, some guys flew home in hels, and some of us went home in a C17 with three hels. On arrival in Trenton, we spent three hours offloading from about 2300 to 0200 and then five hours rebuilding the machines to fly them back to Borden. We pilots assisted the techs where able, mostly with manual labour tasks such as hauling the (bloody heavy) main rotor blade boxes and lifting the blades up to the heads for installation by those better qualified.
This past week has been fairly light, as we still have people and machines in Whistler for the Paralympics. A fair amount of clean-up and maintenance by our techs was required on the machines, as it is after any deployment, and there has been a fair amount of personal administration to catch up on by most of us. This morning I flew a two-hour Standard Manouevres and Emergencies trip just to get back into the basic currency stuff that we could not do in Vancouver, and a couple of instrument approaches. I'm doing a tactical handling trip tomorrow morning.
From the beginning of October 2008 until the end of April 2009 I was in KAF as a Mission Commander for the Sperwer TUAV, which followed several months of training and workups in Borden, Edmonton and Wainwright.
I spent about eight years in a major headquarters as the helicopter booking agent shortly before that.
I got much more flying in previous flying tours, and in a variety of places. I've flown all over non-communist Europe, Norway, England, and a few places in the US for a variety of reasons. I've lived in tents in all weather conditions and seasons for up to almost two months.
I plan exercises and other major activities, fly a variety of missions for ground troops, do VIP missions, static displays at the CNE, and occasionally spend a night or two in a Holiday Inn somewhere.
Do helicopter pilots do mostly personnel transport? Search and rescue? Etc
Tac Hel Squadrons have a secondary SAR role, but I've never trained for it.
We do airmobile troop insertions, rappel, and parachute missions. We sling cargo. We do light transport and escort roles (among others) in Kandahar.
And a bunch of other stuff.
I fly real low, I yank and bank, by sun, by moon and stars
I put on zippered clothing, and hang around in bars.
There really is no "usual" day.
How much time do you actually spend flying? I've heard someone say that CF18 pilots only really fly 150ish hours a year.
I would expect to get more than that, but that, too, depends.
And we don't have to live in Cold Lake or Bagotville.
