Interesting. People fly airplanes for several years and try a heli a couple of times and declare that helis are much harder to learn than airplanes. If you had an instructor to teach you to fly airplanes, but had to learn helis without an instructor and then helis can be harder to learn. Suppose you had an instructor to spend as much time teaching you to fly helis as you did with fixed wing?

I teach people to fly both types of aircraft. I ask them which was harder to learn? Most say that airplanes were more difficult. You see, all I need to do is give them less than an hour of hands-on instruction to learn how to hover and then they can safely go home and learn the rest on their own. Usually by the next day they can hold a sustained hover, most of the time for a whole tank. Keep in mind that most never had any sim time at all. With airplanes, I have to teach them takeoffs, flying smoothly, orientation and how to land, which means I might have to stay with them for a half dozen lessons or more.

CCR