Awesome to discuss with a manned helicopter pilot 
I am not sure if for autonomous mission a helicopter is really better than a multi rotor. on the multirotor we can attach the load much closer to the center of gravity as mentioned by Allister and we have some redundancy…
@dkemxr thank you for sharing that video. seems like the swinging of the load is not a big issue for his helicopter. i maybe should simply start a simple waypoint mission to see how it goes… for sure i should use spline waypoints all the time and low acceleration and decceleration…
@Allister we have built a Quadrotor with a range of 30 km recently, controlled over LTE network. as discussed in this thread: Limit Wind fighting in Auto mode. This might be interesting for you. how much payload are you planning to lift?