For a time a well-to-do patient provided me with a helicopter to get to our appointments at a distant location. My first ride was hair raising. I sat beside the pilot of the Robinson R-44 Raven, a four seater, as we headed out of the city and towards a set of electrical power lines. Go up, up! I shouted inwardly. With my heart in my mouth we glided over the lines so closely I could have reached out of the window and treated myself with the world’s largest dose of ECT. Then I saw flocks of birds coming. What was wrong with this guy? Didn’t anyone ever tell the pilot about bird strikes?! Go up, up! I wanted to yell, but I didn’t.

Miraculously there was no bird strike, but I heard a lot of squawking. I learned afterwards that commercial airliners are far more safe than helicopters, but get real. If a plane hits the ground at 300 miles an hour, not even your DNA is going to survive, to say nothing of your luggage, dental records, and the rest of you. A helicopter, on the other hand, goes at one third the speed of a jet. The impact is less, and there is even the comforting phenomenon of autorotation in which dead rotors slow your descent by passively spinning like a kid’s toy, providing, of course, you don’t land on a mountain or forest. But not to worry. There were emergency copter landing pads the air force had installed every mile or so nestled in the terrain along our course. On a reassurance scale of zero to ten, I gave copter riding a three.