How to Start Your Own Helicopter Charter Business

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A guide for the folks who really want to know.

Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of blog comments and e-mail messages from wannabe helicopter pilots. They’re seeing the reality of the current helicopter job market: too many entry-level pilots, too few jobs, low starting pay, and training that’ll cost them $60,000 to $80,000.

On Job Markets & Flight Schools

They might be reading about this in a post that remains the most popular of all time on this blog: “The Helicopter Job Market.” I wrote this piece just over two years ago, in March 2007 at the height of Silver State’s rise to power as a helicopter flight school. I was tired of seeing young guys (mostly) get conned by promises of $80,000/year jobs that just didn’t exist for newly minted commercial helicopter pilots. I wanted to warn them, but without actively speaking out against Silver State and the companies that had adopted their strategy to turn a quick buck. In all honesty, I didn’t want to get sued. I just wanted readers to consider reality before signing on the dotted line.

We all know what happened to Silver State. It was a Ponzi scheme of sorts that built a massive flight school on the money of tomorrow’s students. When students stopped signing up — due to their inability to get financing or a case of the smarts — and bills came due, Silver State collapsed, leaving many students in debt without their certificates and hundreds of low-time pilots looking for work. It’s a tragedy, not only for the people scrambling to pay the cost of the flight training they may or may not have gotten, but the dumping of so many low-time pilots on the job market made it easy for employers to pick and choose and drop pay rates. The best of the desperate got the entry level jobs they wanted. The others were left out in the cold.

And when the economy began to tank, even the employers cut back. Big seasonal employers at the Grand Canyon and Alaska hired fewer pilots than ever this year and even employers in the Gulf of Mexico began laying off pilots.

The Do-It-Yourself Alternative

Some wannabe pilots think there’s another way to build a flying career, a sort of do-it-yourself method.

Maybe they see from this blog that I didn’t go the usual route — that is, private pilot to commercial pilot to certified flight instructor to get that first 1,000 hours to get an entry level job, etc. Instead, I got my commercial ticket and started my own helicopter charter business. Then I got a bigger helicopter and a Part 135 certificate and, for all appearances, seem to be happily raking in the dough while flying around in my own helicopter.

That’s what they see, anyway.

Lately, they’ve begun commenting on this blog and sending me e-mail, asking for advice. While requests for advice from new or wannabe pilots aren’t anything new, what is new is that the advice they want is about how to start their own helicopter charter companies. Apparently, they believe that since they won’t be able to easily get a job, they will be able to start their own business as a kind of “shortcut” to the career they want.

Here’s My Approach

So I’ve written this blog post to answer these questions from my experience. Here’s my step-by-step approach. If you’re looking for the secret of my success, you might want to print this out for future reference:

  1. Spend $50,000 to learn how to fly helicopters and get a commercial helicopter license.
  2. Spend another $30,000 to $50,000 to build time so you can fly safely under most conditions.
  3. Spend $346,000 or more to buy a helicopter, about $10,000 per year to maintain it, and $12,000 to $32,000 a year to insure it.
  4. Spend 4 to 24 months preparing the paperwork and working with the FAA to apply for a Part 135 certificate. Then take and pass a Part 135 check ride. Then repeat the check ride process every year.
  5. Spend another $10,000 to $30,000 on advertising and marketing.
  6. Take lots of calls from people who can’t understand why you can’t fly them around for the cost of fuel or want you to fly them for free or are trying to get you to donate to their charitable cause. Then get the occasional call that leads to real work for someone who appreciates what you do and understand what it costs.
  7. After ten years and close to a million dollars spent building and maintaining your business, sit back and watch your investment in time and money languish in an economy where few people want to or can spend money on your services.

Get the idea?

At the Big Sandy Shoot
My $346,000 investment, parked at an event in the desert.

There’s an old saying: “The best way to make a million dollars in aviation is to start with two million dollars.”

I’m not complaining. It’s nice having a helicopter. It would be even nicer if I could afford to fly it whenever I wanted to.

But the simple reality is that starting a helicopter charter business is a huge money suck. My aviation business spends more money than most pilots earn each year. If I didn’t have another good source of income, I wouldn’t be able to afford having this business at all.

In Conclusion

If you think that starting your own helicopter charter business is a quick and easy, money-saving way to build a career as a helicopter pilot, think again. It’s neither quick nor money-saving.

But sure. It’s easy. Just add time and money.

Back to Basics with my 12″ PowerBook

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Who needs a netbook? I got this old clunker.

PowerBookYears ago, I bought a 12″ PowerBook. I was attracted to its small size and great power. Back when it was first released, you may remember, it was considered a tiny marvel. While other people flocked to the 17″ PowerBook, I wanted sheer portability and the 12″ was my dream laptop.

Time marches on. A G4 processor operating with 640 MB of RAM isn’t anyone’s dream machine anymore. Hell, when I tried to install Leopard on it last year, it was so slow I had to rebuild the hard disk with Tiger on it.

And I think that’s when I fell out of love with it.

You see, in the meantime, I’d bought a 15″ MacBook Pro. Not one of the new ones — this one is about two years old now. I’d bought it as a test mule — a computer to run software on while I write about the software. But when I finished my Leopard book in September 2007, I began using the MacBook Pro more and more. And when I couldn’t get Leopard to run on the 12″, I realized that it was silly to use an old laptop when I had a newer one. The 12″ wound up on the shelf.

But this morning I pulled it out and dusted it off and fired it up. I let it update Microsoft Office 2004 and various Apple software. I updated my ecto database to pull in all the blog entries I’d written over the past year. And I started writing this.

The sad part about this PowerBook is that the battery is so toasted that it won’t hold a charge for more than 20 minutes of operations. So as a portable computer for use in coffee shops, etc., it fails miserably. But plug it in and sit at the kitchen table and it does everything it’s supposed to.

I want a netbook. I’m sorely tempted by the Dell Mini 9. A buddy of mine says he can transform it into a Hackintosh for me. But I’m also hoping that Apple comes out with their own netbook. If they price it reasonably — and I’m talking about well under $1,000 — I’ll be the first on line to buy one.

And frankly, I don’t give a damn about the so-called “Apple Tax.” Dan Miller of Macworld.com was right in his article, “The Microsoft Discount.” He could be speaking for me when he says:

But for the benefit of my Windows-using friends, I will say for the record: I don’t use a Mac because it’s cool. I use it because it works better for me. I use it because it doesn’t stink.

I’ve got a hopped-up Windows laptop that’s way faster than this little old PowerBook. But when it came time to do a little blogging this morning, I left it gathering dust on the shelf.

Foraging with Alex the Bird

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A down-to-earth video.

So many of my videos are about flying or show off scenes from the air. I thought I’d work on one that was a little closer to earth. This one features my parrot, Alex the Bird, foraging for treats in his cage. I blogged about this particular toy way back in 2006.

The text that follows is the narration you’ll find on the video. The video is at the bottom of this post. This was mostly an experiment to see how I could use the voiceover feature of iMovie ’09. I couldn’t. I wound up recording the narration in Audio Hijack Pro and editing it in Fission, then dragging clips into iMovie. iMovie apparently no longer includes audio editing features. This is unfortunate. I’m trying to figure out why Apple keeps removing features from iMovie as it updates it. (Of course, I can’t complain, given the image stabilization feature is so incredible.)

Anyway, here’s the narration and video. Enjoy.

I’ve put together this little video of Alex foraging for treats. I thought it might be interesting for folks who like birds or are considering buying one. It’s also a video exercise for me, but that’s another story.

In the wild, parrots forage for food. That means they use their claws and beaks to tear apart nuts and berries and pull bark off of trees looking for food. They don’t have their food in ceramic cups like caged parrots do. Foraging is an instinct. It also keeps the birds pretty busy all day so they don’t have time to be bored.

Alex has never lived in the wild, but he still has foraging instincts. And I like to keep him busy so he doesn’t get bored and engage in self-destructive behavior, like feather plucking.

What you see here is a cage-like structure that I bought years ago when I first got Alex. It came with shreddable toys and blocks in it. Alex was only mildly interested in it. But when I replaced those toys with plain old shredded paper surrounding Alex’s favorite treats — edamame or soy bean pods and unsalted cashews — he got very interested. So every few days, I set him up with this hanging toy so he can forage for his favorite foods.

As you watch this video, you might notice a few things.

First, Alex knows the treats are in there and he knows what he needs to do to get at them — pull all the paper out. This looses up the tightly packed cage so he can pull the beans and nuts out and eat them. You’ll see him successfully remove a few beans and nuts in this video. I cut out a lot of the shredding activity. It took Alex about 40 minutes to work through the toy today, and no one is interested in watching him that long.

Also, you’ll see Alex use his feet to steady the swinging toy. Letting the toy swing from the top of the cage makes it tougher for him. Tougher is better. I’ve learned that the goal is to make the foraging task difficult enough that it takes him a long time but not so tough that he gives up.

You may also notice Alex glancing back at the camera. The camera was sitting on a tripod near his cage and he didn’t quite trust it. He keeps looking at it to make sure it’s not sneaking up on him to attack him. Fortunately, he’s more interested in the treats than the camera.

Alex is almost eight years old. He’s expected to live 40 or 50 years. Right now, he’s just finishing up his winter molt, so his feathers don’t look as good as they would in a month or two. He molts every winter and looks pretty ratty for about two to three months.

I hope you enjoyed this visit with Alex. You can stop by my Web site, AnEclecticMind.com, to see more videos from my life.

Visual QuickStart Motor Skills

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It’s all coming back to me.

It’s no secret that Apple will soon — well, hopefully sometime in 2009, anyway — release an update to Mac OS X. It should be numbered 10.6 and it’s definitely called Snow Leopard. But that’s all I can say about it. I’m under nondisclosure and I take this stuff very seriously.

I’m working on a revision to my Mac OS X Visual QuickStart Guide. I just rather belatedly realized that this is the first VQS I’ve worked on in over a year and a half. The last was Leopard (10.5), which was released the same day Leopard hit the Apple stores. I think it was late October 2007. I clearly remember working on it while I traveled. I even blogged about it here, here, here, and here.

I don’t just write VQSes. I also do layout. I write and lay out in InDesign. This year, it’s a real breeze. Not only do I have all the real estate on my 24″ iMac monitor, but I also have another 24″ of real estate on the Samsung sitting next to it.

As I work, I find myself repeating the same keystrokes and mouse drags I performed all those months ago. The shortcuts and techniques have all come back to me — my hands fly over the keyboard and mouse without consulting my brain — and miraculously, they get it right. I even reprogrammed Photoshop actions using the same keystrokes I used for the last VQS project.

Is it any wonder I can completely revise typical page, with new screenshots and added page references, in less than 30 minutes?

The page reference addition is something I’m pretty excited about. Because InDesign has always lacked a good cross-referencing feature, I had to manually reference everything. As a result, I kept it simple and stuck to chapter references. For example, “I tell you more about disks and volumes in Chapter 6.” But when InDesign CS4 was released, it had one feature that made it worth the upgrade for me: cross-referencing. I think that by referencing exact pages in the book, rather than making vague references to chapter numbers, I’m making the book far more valuable as a reference tool than ever before.

At this point, two chapters are done. I’ve got 24 more to go. I’m sure you’ll read more about my progress here.

You’ll have to wait until Snow Leopard hits the shelves to read more about it.

Spelling Checkers Don’t Always Get it Right

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As these students learned the hard way.

Interesting news that hopefully taught a few Brigham Young students a valuable lesson…from Brigham Young Univ Newspaper Recalled Over “Apostle/Apostate” Mix-up.

All copies of the student paper at Brigham Young University have been recalled after a caption labeled a group of Mormon church leaders as “apostates” instead of “apostles.”

The paper claims it was typo caused by spell check. Students, the university statement suggests, are “confused” over the matter but some claim paper is known to be “sloppy” anyway. Readers were told to peruse the paper online.

The university explained: “A spelling error appeared in a photo caption in which the word ‘apostle’ was rendered as ‘apostate.’ In referring to activities at the General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints last weekend, the caption read in part, ‘Members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates and other general authorities raise their hands in a sustaining vote. . . ‘.€

Given the circumstance, it’s actually pretty funny. As my Dictionary widget informs me, in the Mormon Church, an apostle is one of the twelve administrative officers of the Church. An apostate, on the other hand, is “a person who renounces a religious or political belief or system.” Whoa.

This is a grand example of today’s students’ dependency on writing tools — such as spelling checkers — to get things right. Not only did the author of the piece not know the correct spelling of apostle — in itself hard to believe when the word has such significance in that particular school — but when presented with a list of choices for the correct spelling, the student chose the wrong one. That means he or she aparently can’t read, either. Or was too lazy to look the word up in a dictionary. (Heck, I had the full definition of apostate within 5 seconds with a few keystrokes.)

Of course, it also says a lot about the proofreading — or lack thereof — of the newspaper in question by people who should know better.

This all goes back to something I’ve been saying since I began teaching and writing about word processing way back in 1990: a spelling checker will help make sure the spelling is right, but it can’t do a thing to make sure the word is right.

Hat tip to @vectorbabe on Twitter for sharing the link.