Is it harder to fly a helicopter or a jet fighter?

Question

Is it harder to fly a helicopter or a jet fighter?

Answer 1

Helicopter

Answer 2

helo

Answer 3

It is more difficult to learn to fly a rotary winged aircraft than a conventional aircraft.

The most difficult fixed wing aircraft to fly is currently the Harrier.

Answer 4

I've flown both in the military.

It is hard to learn to hover. My first hover was almost a minute long! But in a fighter everything happens faster. You must know all your checks and procedures and you must do them fast.

A fighter is harder to fly. I flew helo's for five years, Hornets for the last eight years.

Trust someone who has done both, thus far two of us have.

Answer 5

With a helicopter you get it in the air and move the stick between your legs as fast as you can.

When you've got the helicopter where you want it remember where the stick is as if you want to get the helicopter there again that is where you put the sitck.

Good luck my friend.

Answer 6

Fighters, no contest, particularly Navy Fighters...helos are real good at covering traffic snarls.

"There are only two kinds of aircraft, Fighters and Targets"

Answer 7

A Helicopter, Planes can takeoff and fly faster, and fly upside down, side flying for a while. But helicopter are hard to do that you have to turn this way and that way and trim loads of times.

Answer 8

Great question.  Each is equally difficult in its own way.  I too flew both too – 3 years in helos and ten in Hornets.

Helicopters are difficult because they demand a lot more from a pilot on the controls – stick and rudder stuff.  If you don't fly for a few weeks, you might be rusty on the controls.  Those skills erode quickly.  We were never even allowed to take our hands off the controls to pick our nose without a positive change of controls to the other pilot (other helicopters might vary) in the event of a servo hard-over or something.  If fighter pilots view helo pilots as primitives, they have no concept of how terrible their own monkey skills are in comparison.  Plus, your mind is more focused inward as a "brooding anticipator of trouble" since there are so many moving parts and complex systems and concepts keeping you in the air.  You become a master of systems in order to keep you alive.  Tactics are usually pretty low on the training to-do list since you're a target at best.  If you're flying an attack helicopter, you're still an easy target no matter how good your tactics are.  Hide behind the trees and be tactical all day, but there's still a gunner in the front seat taking care of "tactics" while you worry about rotor speed, engine rpms, caution lights, fuel, weight, and the correct tire pressures.

Fighters are can be pretty athletic in the cockpit, but they are difficult because they force your abstract mind well ahead of the aircraft and into things that can't be seen by your eyeballs or touched with your hands.  Anyone can fly a jet; they're easy for a reason.  A fighter pilot needn't worry himself with something so trivial as controlling the aircraft when he's got so much to think about elsewhere five minutes from now.  Most, ok, 99% of fighter pilots don't have a substantial  knowledge of their jet's basic systems because their survival depends mostly on tactics.  Hollywood has been re-creating WWII air battles since WWII, so that's why we have this perception that there's all this turn-and-burn Maverick-do-some-of-that-pilot-stuff going on in a fighter.  True, you're busier that a ____ ____ goat and there might be a lot of maneuvering, but there's hardly any time for enjoying the scenery so that's where a ton of difficulty comes in.  Granted, landing on the boat in the Navy is a serious feat of stick-and-rudder goodness and it's practiced and honed to great degree, but it is a highly focused task for a very particular environment.  The rest of the challenge is, again, creating those mental images and flying around the boat in bad weather, using your radar, communicating, planning ahead, and handling your wingman.  Even when maneuvering in direct air combat, the skill on the stick isn't as demanding as a helicopter can be just to hover at times.  It's the planning, cunning, aggression, and thinking that wins the knife fight.

Yet all that stick-and-rudder helo time added up to making learning to land a jet on the boat a walk in the park for me personally...even at night while my peers were struggling.  It was all the work in the single-seat cockpit that I had to play catch-up with that was difficult.  Only pure fighter guys who don't know a stitch about helicopters will say they flew the most difficult thing out there.  Only Tomcat guys will actually believe it (after having a RIO do all their work for them).  And only Tomcat RIOs will make such a claim to score chicks. Hahhahahahahaha.