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Old 13th Sep 2023, 04:40
  #35 (permalink)  
Rotorbee
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Europe
Posts: 434
Received 22 Likes on 13 Posts
Since only Agile and me are talking about the elephant in the room ... normally people on this forum ask how to become a helicopter pilot and not what helicopter to buy before they even get to the PPL stage. I would suggest, that you do a bit of soul searching and ask yourself, do I want to learn to fly or do I want a new toy? Flying in general is serious business. We have discussed many accidents here, where we were puzzled what happened and in the end it was just utter stupidity. Famous people have died, because they sought a helicopter is just a toy. Many have convinced examiners to be dedicated pilots but learned, that the laws of physics are not forgiving at all. They will get you. Kill you. Or your children. Or your wife. Or the cat. Especially in helicopters. After an accident, relatives often claim "oh, he/she was such a experienced and cautious pilot" while in reality he/she was the typical Bonanza doctor. That is why we have all those rules and regulations. They are written in blood. They are there to make you safe. You have to learn them and live by them. Learning the theory will take you several hundred hours of studying.

If you have your own ship, you have to take care of the whole paperwork, too. Incomplete documentation can devaluate your ship more than a crack in the windscreen. You have to be on top of the hours flown, too, because a missed scheduled maintenance will again make your ship a paperweight. And no, you can't just fly to maintenance shop to fix the issue. Once that helicopter is on the ground with a faulty/rundown part, it stays there. This has killed many who thought to know better. Do you really want all that? You can ask somebody to manage that for you, but it will cost you, too. And again, they have to be proficient on your particular helicopter, too.

In your region around Montreal flying an MD ship isn't ideal. No service centers. When your ship is down for anything, and that could be something very minor but it will still ground you. You have to find somebody who comes to you to fix it. The only Canadian MD service center is on the west coast. Therefore you would have to fly your ship for a lot of scheduled maintenance tasks to the US and find a service center that knows the Canadian regulations, too.
In your area are mostly Robinson, Airbus and Bell ships.
You might not like it, but it think you are stuck with Robinson. BTW, not every flight school/flight instructor will train you in your own ship. A. Because they are not proficient in it, B. They prefer to rent out their own ships, C. They want to be sure, the ship is properly maintained. D. Some might do it, but will take the keys from you, to prevent you to do stupid things while they are not there (which has happened more often than you think).
There is not a lot of sense in owning your own helicopter before you have a least a PPL.
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