What do you think of this helicopter-pilot?

[Frank N. O.]

I just read this and here's a direct translation of the danish text and I'd like to know what you think about this.

Helicopter Mystery at parking lot.

A helicopter lands every morning on the parkinglot at Allerød (a city -Frank) and takes off at again at the end of the workday.

A brand-new helicopter is parked in these days at the parkinglot at Solvang in the industrial neighbourhood in Allerød, according to Frederiksborg County Newspaper, friday.
Witnesses claim the helicopter each day this week has landed at the parkinglot. At the end of the day it takes off again and leaves the parkinglot.

No-one knows who the pilot has been on the highly polished helicopter of the brand Robinson.

According to the regulations for civilian aviation it's not entirely legal to park your helicopter on public parkinglots. Especially not when the helicopter is parking very few meters from the trainstation and a very short distance from residential proporties and a kindergarden.

The owners of the helicopter is the insurancecompany GE Capital but the user itself, and thereby the person responsible for the vehicle is unknown.

I also checked the forum at pilots.dk a site exclusively with real-life pilots including commercial ones but I'd like to hear your oppinion on this before posting their comments.

Frank

[Mike]

In the US the regulations say you can't fly or land anywhere you would endanger person or property, which translates in the commercial world into "as long as nobody complains" I have found. Because who would really know if you endangered them unless they tell somebody.
Common sense is the key.
In LA a brand new pilot got in trouble when she landed her little Robinson in a coldesack to visit friends and it turned out city ordinance doesn't allow helicopter landings in the street (city ordinance, not the FAA).
But here in Arkansas we land pretty much anywhere. Having a helicopter with big bright red letters spelling out the word "FIRE" doesn't hurt of course.
Last month I picked up a rich guy from his house in LA (landed in his yard with his own personal putting green) and flew him to a race track and it was no big deal. I had a safe ingress/egress without flying directly over other houses/cars/people/dogs and nobody said anything....

Common sense = landing in a parking lot with cars parked in it ??
probably not!

[Zaffex]

We have this here too. My father knows a guy in the excavation business who flies his helicopter to a local equipment and parts dealer for excavation equipment. He just lands in the parking lot, in fact I think most people know about him and just leave an open space for him to land in.

[Gulfstream Driver]

The nice thing about helicopters is they can go almost anywhere.  As long as it's done in a safe manner, I wouldn't have a problem with it...

There was an incident a few years ago in Phoenix where a police helicopter landed in the parking lot of a Krispy Kream.     The pilots really needed a doughnut fix.  Both officers got in trouble.   

[Frank N. O.]

It seems that the story was at least partly exagerated again by the media. At the danish forum a person claiming to be the pilot, in the news identified as the president, said that it was a private parkinglot, he landed in the middle of it and taxied to the edge not to take all of it looking like a powermonger, and the space was a lot better in real life than described and it was only twice and there was permission. They'd had a complaint earlier from a neighbour that didn't like their vehicles parked on the side of the road due to their numbers although it was legal so he thinks it might be him. The post seemed very calm, mature and responsible, like you people here. What the posters of the forum said before he posted was something like like: "Darn that's cool I'd do that too!" "It's probably just a dumb jalous person that complained!" In DK we had a principle called the Jante-law, meaning that you shouldn't think you were any better than any other and don't show off. The posters mentioned that too. Luckily at least the real pilot seems to be a more responsible person than shown by the papers and I just hope the others at the forum aren't fulltime pilots.

Kind of a good end to a bad story I think and yet more proof that the media and other people talk a lot about subjects they don't know enough about to do what they do, like a certain danish newspaper-editor and some drawings of religous nature, he should've researched if it was a mortal sin or not to make them, and he should've heeded the warnings he indeed got before signing them off for printing.
But it seems like a loosing battle for the most part so I can only try to keep up my own way of behaving in real life evn if I slip up like this time, and try to investiage things myself and from more than one source and also talk to real people and not exclusively read from a single news-source about subjects, especially important ones. I just hope information and news from AOPA and the FAA is more dependable.

Thanks for the reassuring posts

Frank