It's not clear - to David Miles anyway - that you get any extra benefit from resorting to a helicopter drop.
The "helicopter drop" of claims, without actually analysing the quality of these claims, has added to the bureaucratic costs the banks are facing.
As long as Bank rate is near zero and the Bank of England buys new gilts to replace the ones that mature, quantitative easing looks an awful lot like a "helicopter drop".
For Prof Miles, this raises an obvious question: what, exactly, do we get out of a "helicopter drop" - or the bank just extinguishing all the gilts it has bought - which we do not get out of the policy we have now?
For Prof Miles, the only real difference between QE and even more "unconventional" money financing is that, with QE, the terms on which the money is created "are flexible and sensitive to inflationary pressures" - whereas in the case of a helicopter drop, the terms are more open.
The larger point is that there is now a surprisingly long list of respected figures who have said a "helicopter drop" - a dose of money-financed fiscal stimulus which is never paid back - is worth talking about, even if they do not necessarily want to do it right away.
Prof Miles says the easiest way to think about a "helicopter drop" is as a lump sum temporary tax cut - or a one-off reverse poll tax - financed by new government bonds which are purchased by the Bank of England on the secondary market, but with all interest and redemption payments etc transferred back to the Treasury.
"Anybody that's still doing the egg drop from the helicopter is behind the times, " says Jeff Chase, assistant director for parks and recreation in Acworth, Ga.
Operators of Aberdeen International Airport said the drop in numbers in the helicopter sector last month was offset by growth in domestic and international fixed-wing passengers.
Elsewhere, the grounding of the Super Puma EC 225 since a helicopter ditched off Shetland on 22 October contributed to a 1.2% drop in passenger numbers at Aberdeen International Airport.
Police footage showed a man appear to drop to one knee by a car in Clifton Close, Aston, and point a gun at the helicopter, prosecutor Andrew Lockhart QC said.
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