I too had been here before, not years ago, but a month or so back.
Anyway, what I didn’t say about yesterday’s flight was that it wasn’t just overcast and raining, but live weather also included a 17kt wind. In this wind, I was working my way into central Paris from the southeast, landing at whatever airfield or helipad lay in my path.
Landing on the ground, even in a decent breeze, was no problem, but then I came to an elevated hospital helipad with, next to it, an even taller building - presumably, the hospital.
Oh dear. Vicious updrafts, not just the usual sudden onset of ground effect when crossing onto elevated landing pads, but serious turbulence. In retrospect, I should have turned on Aerodynamic Visualisation (CFD) to see what was happening, but at the time I was rather preoccupied with not crashing.
Eventually I gathered up my deep sense of failure and moved on to the next hospital helipad; this one wasn’t easy but, being the highest point on the building, was at least landable. I managed it once I realised that the true wind direction was indeed being shown by the windsock, and not my GTN750, which was showing the wind direction at right angles to that.
At which point, exhausted, I saw my GTN750 was also showing me the letters ‘LFPI’ at the edge of the map, and while I would never have remembered it without that prompt I did recognise that it was the ICAO code of a heliport blessedly at ground level where I could land without too much drama.
Incidentally, you’ll notice in the picture that my SA 315B Lama’s landing lights are still on (first time I’d flown the Lama in weather dull enough for me to pay attention to them). I actually spent an age sitting there looking for the landing light switch without success.
Eventually I gave up, ended the flight and - Say it ain’t so! - had to fall back on reading the manual.
It turns out that the difficulty in finding the landing light switch was caused by there not being one. To turn the landing lights on and off in the Lama you have to resort to the circuit breaker in the overhead panel.
Well, I’ll know next time.