Stan Gosnell wrote:


They do if they fly helicopters, just as we do in the US. Flying from the
left seat has never made any sense at all to me. Most people are right-
handed, and flying from the left seat requires using your left hand, while
using the right to tune radios, etc. We fly helicopters from the right,
allowing the use of the right hand on the cyclic stick to keep upright, while
tuning, eating donuts, etc with the left.

In reality, flying from the right puts the collective in the center, so you
don't have to climb over it to get in and out; plus, the very early models
had only one collective, and the left-seat pilot had to use the left hand on
the cyclic, and the right on the collective, and this isn't easy to get used
to. Most of these type things go back to historical trivia; it was done on
one model for whatever reason, and just became tradition.

I heard once that the right-seat thing got started because some early model had
flame coming out the exhaust stack that was very distracting from the left seat
at night.

Probably a pure BS urban legend, though. ;-)