investigating that hypothesis is easier, since there are fewer places to land a helicopter in the rockies. or maybe he tied down the control stick and rappelled from the empty helicopter. Or perhaps dropped it on a line and went back on foot later to conceal it :)
Why not, by the way? Why don't helicopters have a simple control input system these days, that can be interpreted by a computer and applied to actual flight controls?
I'm imagining a helicopter with the same controls as a current one, but where the "balancing" act is done by computer. It's stable by default, and the human inputs controls to ascend, descend, rotate, or tilt in the desired direction. So a human could take their hands off the controls in a stationary helicopter and it would stay stationary. If the human wants to fly forward, they push the cyclic stick forward, and that's it, no need to compensate in the other controls.
Is this just not done because fly-by-wire would make helicopters even more expensive or less reliable? Are there any fly-by-wire helicopters today?
Modern multi-blade drones do this very thing : attitude, altitude and heading hold. They are incredibly stable, and even have a "return home" feature, obstacle avoidance, and more. Very sophisticated.
Could this be adapted to a full-size craft? Possibly, but that's a serious engineering task that would involve a lot of development and testing.
For that reason, I think it is exceeding unlikely to think a 78 year old man, ill with cancer, would invent and equip a 3-axis fly-by-wire guidance control/autopilot system for a helicopter so he could rappel down and hide a treasure while a helicopter hovered overhead. Then after securing the treasure, he would presumably climb the rope to re-enter the craft, disable the attitude hold then fly away.
This sort of thing is best left to the James Bond films.
