Originally Posted by
FH1100 Pilot
This is what a lot of pilots don't understand about how profitable tours can be. It's not about clock-hours - it's about *flight hours* (skids-up to skids-down). The only thing that matters is how much time the helicopter is spending in the air, right? Because *that* is what your operating costs are based on. It literally does not matter how many rides you can accomplish in a human clock-hour.
Let's say you do ten rides and it takes an hour of *your* time...and say each one takes three minutes (half a tenth of an hour, or .05) skids-up to skids-down in a perfect world. Okay, so those ten rides would actually only add up to 30 minutes (10 X 3 minutes). But for that little half-hour of component flight time, you just made $1,200, assuming you were charging $20 per head and you had a full ship each time. That, my friends, is $2,400 per flight hour for that helicopter.
Obviously there is going to be some downtime during refueling and pilot-swaps, etc. Maybe there's a lull in the demand. Whatever. But on a busy day, you might "work" 10 hours but put, what, 7 hours on the ship? If you keep it full, seven hours at $2,400 is $16,800. Not bad for a day's work! Of course, the pilots see very little of that. This is why some operators (I know of one in particular) beat pilots over the head to keep the rides to a certain duration. Even a minute or so added to every ride can seriously mess with your profits.
Now of course, the world isn't perfect. Not every weekend will be flyable, weather-wise the whole time. The ship won't be full every time. Some rides you'll only have two people. Maybe there'll be a big lull during lunch or when a band is playing or something and you're not flying. Maybe the pilot is sloppy and makes every ride four minutes instead of three. Maybe you'll only be able to gross, oh, $1,500 per hour and only put seven hours on the ship. Still, that's a cool $10,500 for the day. How many days is this fair going on? Friday, Saturday and Sunday? $30,000 for a weekend? "I'm going to Hawaii, boys! Get the ship to the next fair and I'll see you on Friday!"
Sightseeing/tours can make a LOT of money.
If you don't crash the ship ;-)