The comments with personal experiences is the most informative part. It's no surprise that passing a single test a single time is not an assurance of continued proficiency, but it certainly can be used to exclude people who might otherwise drive wages down.
I wonder if vertical LED strip lights spaced around the cockpit that illuminated sets of individual LEDs would be effective at establishing an artificial horizon without requiring the vertigo inducing turning and tilting of the pilot's head that looking down and to the side a conventional instrument panel can. Advantageously they could be in the pilots line of sight almost all the time, reinforcing their reliability and calibrating the pilot relative to them against external cues. Color could be variable to align with lighting - red at night, some other color in the day time. No need to provide expensive focus optics as a typical HUD requires.
Example - one strip up the right side, one up the left, and one in the middle would provide 3 points defining a plane parallel to the nominal Earth at that point. Maybe add some offset for all three to account for pilot eye-height?
We have an in your face horizon already with hud systems. In fact we get all the major instruments on that.
Its purely a what your used to issue.
If you only ever fly your check rides under the hood then your scan and mental process is not in place or up to speed.
Its the same way the other way round to be honest. I haven't flown VFR in years. Yes we do visual approaches but that's sit an instrument procedure. And to be honest all the RT load of VFR and getting clearances is gone.
An instrument flight start before you even light the engines planning is different, paper work is different, mind set is different. When your current swapping between looking out the window and instruments it isn't a problem. Getting caught low level in semi skimmed milk and then having to make stuff up on the fly while keeping the thing upright and in control is. And it doesn't get any easier the older you get. Some are great at it but they are doing it everyday.
There are major differences in regulations' between FAA and EASA for public transport and ambulance flights. There is always lots of discussions about what actually is required to be economically safe. The EASA regs are crippling expensive but the accident rate is much lower /1000 flights but there is extremely little volume of traffic because of those regs.
Rotary pilots are a different set of people to fixed wing and the culture is different and the acceptable risk.
