Australasia still doing well
The Australian government recently released the annual budget. We appear still to be the lucky country with low inflation, an almost record low unemployment and a budget surplus of over AUD$8 billion.
What does this mean to the average chopper driver or engineer?
The shortages of technical people, forecast recently, does not appear to have a long term solution. As the airlines expand, we will lose more engineers to them, so we must encourage any attempts to get young people into technical training programmes, rather than going to university. (But what is every parent’s dream?)
Also, we must get the insurance companies to lift the embargo on low hour pilots. ASFA, AOPA and the HAA to mention a few are now doing research into “the gut feeling” that low hour pilots are not cause of accidents. It is our dream that research may prove low hour pilots are not the problem, and thus they will get that first job more easily and not be exploited by hungry and greedy employers.
So what is actually happening in Australia and New Zealand?
The industry is continuing to grow at twice the GDP at about 8% in Australia and New Zealand. Our fleet doubled in size to the present Australian 1204 and New Zealand to 606 in eleven years. Due to predicted strong economic growth we expect the fleet to double again in only seven years. By comparison the aeroplane light aircraft fleet is barely making half the GDP at about 1 – 2 %.
The Robinson fleet in both countries dominates by a large margin. Australia has 372 Robinson R22 and 128 Robinson R44. The nearest to these figures are the Bell 206 at 170, Bell 47 at 111 and Squirell AS350 at 78. Robinsons are still very much in demand and the R44 is outselling the R22 through out the world, and will do so in Australia in the near future.
New Zealand’s most popular helicopter is also the Robinson R22 at 136, followed by the Hughes/Schweizer 500 series at 95 and the As 350 Squirrel at a close 93. The next place is a tussle between the Robinson R44 at 63 and the Hughes/Schweizer series 269 at 60. Slowly being edged out is the Bell 206 family at 53. The EADS products are making inroads into NZ and their numbers are expected to grow as tourism improves.
Readers can see what types are in service and a bit of study will provide some idea where they should look for employment. The HAA can provide a complimentary Excel data base of the 1,600 helicopters in Australia and New Zealand. Unfortunately, we cannot get any sense out of Papua New Guinea, but we are working on it! In any case PNG has only about 60 helicopters and their economy is really very third world and despite the huge amount of aid from other nations, the country is drifting along very slowly.