Well, depending on what chopper you want to try out, you could do something else to get a quick start on it.
The British Merlin Transport chopper spawns right off the bat in Al Basrah Insurgency mode.
Apaches Spawn in five minutes into Al Basrah AAS/Conquest. Just take a Land Rover out for a spin and seem to long you can last flipping that thing through the desert landscape.
If you are trying to fly anything on *Kashan Desert, you could grab a Humvee and cap some flags and start searching for the M82 kit
Well, this gives me an idea. How about a test map that would have all the vehicles in the game for you to take out for a spin, instant respawn times, and Pilot/Crewman kits laying on the ground so you don't have to deal with QM or the sv.numplayerstostart 1 restart time, heck if Teamlocking is map controlled, you could remove that and put EVERY vehicle in there to test it.
Make a few custom textures and put them on instructional billboards so we know what weapons the thing has and what they do if we've never seen them. IE: I didn't know what an AIM 120 was until I looked it up, now I know it's a better A2A missile the F16 has in *Kashan Desert.
*Sorry if I misspelled it, close enough to make the connection your self, eh?