Yes. Have a read of "Rescue Pilot" by Jerry Grayson. It's a great read. He describes how they used to practise hovering with a single front wheel resting on the top of a particular coastal rock formation. It was a competition in the sense that one crew upped the ante by managing to balance their tail wheel on the rock, so the rest of the crews followed.
[1] https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/rescue-pilot-9781472918840/
Edit: Another link: http://rescuepilot.net/
Yet another book to add to the wishlist... I'm gonna need a job that gives me a bit of spare time, the pile is getting pretty big, haha.
The Vulcan bit leapt out at me; I've also read Vulcan 607! That book was purely technical; I would have appreciated an explanation about the political upheaval going on with the RAF at the time as well, I had absolutely no idea.
I had no idea hovering over sea is as complex as it is - of course everything underneath the helicopter is going up and down. So the helicopter needs to match that if it doesn't want to whomp onto the deck as it lands. Hah.
And so, in the same vein, hovering over a ship doing rescue operations is clearly going to preclude the use of the kind of autopilot described in the GGP comment.
I've been interested in the idea of flying since I was about 15, but I've been dragging my feet on getting involved for years (I'm 27 now) - if I love it, I'll be depressed I can't afford to dive right in, but if I hate it or can't get my head around the flight controls (I have poor hand-eye coordination, a lot of visual things don't "click" for me, and I can't keep an RC helicopter in the air), I'm not sure if I'd handle the let-down. Because of the expense involved I'm a bit on the fence about it.
Various health issues are why I didn't go the RAAF route a long time ago. (I'm not even sure what to name my condition - I've briefly described it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15005811 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17780498.)
At the end of the day, any mistake at 5 foot or 50 foot away is likely to be fatal!
This reminded me of another comment I read recently, and I was actually able to remember where I read it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17723107
> Hi- I used to work in regulated pharma and I want to be clear: " The core problem is that the FDA-approved devices are optimized not for getting the best result, but for ensuring the manufacturer can't be blamed if something goes wrong" is a misleading statement. The reason everything is regulated is that sometimes things do go wrong, and it's necessary to have root cause attribution so the problem can be remedied and a fix deployed, and, if somebody did something illegal or dumb, they can be sanctioned.
(The quoted part of this comment, itself from a previous comment, is the part I found relevant, but I quoted the whole thing (reply and all) because I found the whole thing interesting.)
I think I can naively say with confidence that aviation and medical certification are very similarly rigorous.
So, it sounds to me that the autohover functionality you describe was perhaps the equivalent of Tesla "Autopilot" (which really amounts to auto-steer). The context of doing rescue lifesaving over sea is indeed very stringent, but at the same time, it's not going to be the end of the world if the helicopter moves around a bit, because it's in the open air. And if the situation is dire - strong crosswinds, or someone in critical condition - the pilot's training probably instructs them not to use it.
In this situation, letting the controls go for 2-3 seconds (as per the other comments here) is going to mean an unrecoverable crash, and perhaps a rotor blade might cut one of the cables and then you have 220kV waving everywhere, hitting other power lines, touching the ground..... no. You just find the best pilots that can hover Really Well™, and pay them metric stupid amounts of money so they don't go anywhere else.
Now I'm wondering if the pilots hold hovering competitions, in the same way people in the military frequently do target practice.