A short YouTube safety tip by Kenny Keller advising pilots on steep approaches and vertical descents. Keller emphasizes keeping the wind off the nose (i.e., having headwind), avoiding having wind from behind which can push vortices and snow/turbulence up under the helicopter during landing; he illustrates the point with an EMS-era photo showing vortices and snow swirl.
When you're doing a steep approach or a vertical descent, then you really got to make sure that that wind is off of your nose. You got to use good pilot technique, getting the wind behind you. And a steep approach or vertical descent is just. It's just not good. In this picture, this is a picture when I was flying ems, actually, I was going in for doing that landing, and somebody took that picture and got it to me. And I just like that because you can see all those vortices and that snow coming up and swirling around. Well, think about if the wind's behind you, it's pushing all that stuff up underneath you as you're coming into land, that wind is pushing that turbulence up underneath of you. So that's what you got to be thinking about.
