How tight is it?

[Arm out the window]

For those with dirty minds, sorry, this is a clean question.

I know that whenever I buy anything or get a servicing done on the car it usually costs a bucketload; I was wondering how you smaller helicopter operators manage to keep cash flowing in the positive direction.

It seems that the costs of buying or leasing, maintaining, running, hangaring, insuring, wages, tax and all the damn rest of it must be so much that it must be very difficult to just keep going for the smaller 'battler'.

Is this the case, or is there money to be had for smart operators?

Just curious.

[Jed A1]

It is tight out there in both the aviation world and any other business. However, there is still good money to be had by smart operators. To survive in these times you have to be a professional business person first, selling a quality product. The product in this case just happens to be aviation. If you can approach business this way then there is a long and bright future ahead for all of us.

Smart operators in my view are successful from developing their own markets and not competing too fiercely with others for the (relatively) small amount of general charter work that is around. Some operators over the last 10-15 years have been incredibly successful in specialising in niche markets like Police, EMS, film work, and tourist or shuttle flights. These operators have become experts in there fields and thus retain their revenue streams year after year.

Thankfully the days of a guy leasing a machine, getting an operators license and declaring that he or she is a charter company are passing. These people fought hard to win business from other operators at the expense of all i.e. much lower charter rates. There is no need for this. Why compete hard to get GBP 300 / hr for a B206 doing general charter work, when with a little thought, imagination and work you can get GBP 1,000 / hr for the same machine in a niche market.