It's all been a lot of fun extracting the Michael over the use of a helicopter, but do any of you aviation professionals (and others) that post here actually care that the attitude being engendered is that using a helicopter shouldn't even be considered?
The trip by car would have been close to one and a half hours each way, depending on traffic, so a total of 2.5 - 3 hours. The helicopter flight would have been less than 30 minutes, probably 0.9hr round trip. Time saving of about two hours.
An employee on $300,000 per year is worth ~$3,000 per hour to the employer (long explanation but it's been around for years, check with Business Aviation for the maths). Time spent traveling is generally non-productive to the employer so a saving is generated by the number of employees multiplied by the time saved multiplied by the total hourly cost of each employee.
So Bishop plus acolytes hourly costs easily exceed the $5300 cost of the helicopter, and also had an extra two hours to be used productively.
This is the formula that I used frequently when selling VIP helicopter use, and it works. Whilst we all like to knock anything that a politician does with 'our' money I'd like to think that there is enough professional understanding of our parlous industry to lend some sort of support to companies generally who need this sort of business, be it politicians or businessmen.