The successful helicopter airline is the rotorcraft world’s equivalent of the lost continent of Atlantis. There are legends of its having once existed but as the years stretch into the distance, the chances of its ever having been real seem to fade away. You can almost count on one hand the number of scheduled helicopter operations putting black ink into their books and have fingers left over. (To be precise, they are the Vancouver, British Columbia-based HeliJet Airways, British International Helicopter’s Penzance-Scilly Islands run at England’s southwesternmost tip, Copterlines, linking Helsinki, Finland with Tallinin, Estonia, and a handful of short-haul, inter-island operations linking Hong Kong and Macao.)
To be successful, a helicopter airline entrepreneur needs to fulfill a simple if demanding formula. There must be at least a pair of destinations each sharing a high demand for passenger traffic and not too far apart. Ideally, they should be separated by some sort of barrier difficult to surmount, such as water or congested urban sprawl. And there should be room for helicopter landing sites close to the desired destinations, ideally more convenient than the local airport by an order of magnitude. After all, isn’t the ability to land vertically right on top of the desired destination the whole reason for the additional operating expense and complexity of rotary-wing flight?
More In Rotorcraft
