Pticka

I’ll be blunt but please don’t take offence as that’s not the intent.
I think there is something inherently arrogant about your plan, and your perceived ability to solve the many real problems that have been raised. However I will also say I find Elon Musk is extremely arrogant so recognise that is needed for some projects. It’s a good idea to recognise your attitude going in. Maybe you areas capable as him!

Honestly having come from the industry you have clearly been successful in, would it be reasonable for someone with zero experience to enter and with a years experience successfully set up a multi million dollar business and succeed???

I have no direct experience so take it with a grain of salt but I hear with Japanese all foreign people are considered Gajin which translates to foreigner. While the Japanese are very polite and like interacting with foreigners they are outsiders. In fact my understanding is within Japanese culture they are very closed off to even there own people and have extremely tight inner circles. Real friendship doesn’t come easy and politeness does not equate to niceness. You may find been seen as a foreigner in a closed culture makes some of those hurdles hard to overcome some here have implied impossible.

Your proposed undertaking has a massive amount of risk. I would advise you work for an existing company and keep your money in much less risky ventures or as has been suggested buy into an existing business at least until you have enough experience to know what you are getting into.

If you have heard of the Dunning Kruger effect, I’d say you estimate your knowledge to be say 5-10% when it is likely 0.001%
heli sking is advanced work that takes experience that can only be achieved in the aircraft.
Setting up a business in Japan you have been warned by people in the know.
Even with 500hrs which in industry is a fledgling pilot those will be artificial. You just can’t simulate hours in the aircraft doing the real job. You won’t have 500hours experience as compared to a working pilot.

I’d strongly advise getting a regular job in industry before risking your money. Even if you buy in and then can get mentored and fast tracked in an existing outfit.

If you are crazy enough to continue who is it for anyone else to dump on your dreams. While you have been warned if you do continue I genuinely wish you good luck and hope you are back on this forum in 5 years to tell everyone they are wrong and you have a successful business.

I’d take a good look at early model AS350’s. you can always get something newer and shiner if things go well.

That is a very sensible approach to the problem.
One more thing. Don't think that there are many fresh opportunities in the helicopter world. Every niche has been exploited or somebody is waiting that another operator is going out of business and taking its place. You can be absolutely sure, that the company already operating in Hokkaido, has tried everything to get every possible permission. As far as I know, they have very few landing spots, some say just one. That is all they got after many years of operating there.
The times where helicopters were new and everybody tried to find new business opportunities are over. We now know, what works and what not. The regulations are tight and that is because they have been written after we found out the hard way, what does not work. If you have your sight set on heliskiing, stay in Canada. If you go to Japan, because you want to have a life there, open your mind to other possibilities, than heliskiing, which for a pilot is rather boring and for many companies just the job for the winter. The opportunity you believe to see, to fulfil your dream, has probably already been recognised by somebody from the industry and they found out it isn't worth the hassle.

"heliskiing, which for a pilot is rather boring"

The customers aren't so nice either....

The OP's posts appear to have gone through some sort of translation process into English, because their written style and the words used are unusual.

I hope they are not assuming that they can interact with Japanese speakers and Japanese companies in the same way*

I would suggest that believing that you will be able to learn to fly helicopters to a professional standard, AND do so in a very challenging area - both geographically and meteorologically, AND start a business, AND do so in a distant country, AND in a very different language to your own*, are far too many factors.

Any one of these factors is difficult individually, but added together, I would caution that success seems extremely unlikely, and might very well lead to a substantial loss of money.

You really shouldn't jump into any of this until, at the very least, you have passed the appropriate aircrew medical and learned to fly turbine helicopters with a suitable commercial rating, OR have got your business up and running by employing proper, experienced commercial pilots.

Being able to operate complex machinery; (a hydraulic platform maybe, or a crane perhaps?), is no guarantee of success - nor even an indication of an ability - to fly an aircraft. There are many, many more factors to flying than merely operating the machine. There is no overall emergency stop button on an aircraft ! - you have to be able and competent to fly out of any airborne failure or emergency

*(unless the OP is actually Japanese? Maybe Canadian born Japanese?).

I think you are all being way too polite?

The whole story is preposterious! It has to be a wind up. How can you all be taken in by such a made up fantasy by someone without even a single hour of flying experience?

I can't stop laughing!

Keep laughing.
While this might be wind up, it is also possible that OP is genuinely interested in starting heliski company and doesn't know any better.
You never received help learning something new?

Maybe it’s an AI program believing it is natural, trying to create prompts for those Humans that it thinks are (limited intelligence) AI Bots, compelling them to come up with a good answer :8.

There is certainly a strong smell of ChatGPT about it..........

Or a teenager dreaming maybe.

Keep up at the back. 😉

So AI is picking our brain, trying to compile the knowledge and wisdom of the best helicopter experts in the world, right here on PPRune.
Is it time to start feeding fake information? and give it a bunch of "likes" to goof AI up.

How to make a small fortune in helicopter aviation.... start with a large fortune!

Someone had to say it!

By the way I'm sure you emailed me the other day about an inheritance!

Insulting the manner in which I express my thoughts seems odd at best. However, in order to make the information communicated by me more intelligible to you, I will use shorter words, bullet points, and visuals in any further posts that I make.

Again, thank you to all those posters who made a meaningful contribution to the thread. I will re-read your posts as I'm moving forward.

I do agree that there are a number of obstacles to overcome. Ad augusta, per angusta! As I've indicated in one of my earlier replies, I plan a thorough recognizance mission to evaluate the feasibility of all the aspects of my plan. I think that an underdeveloped market in a highly developed country presents many opportunities. The reasons for its underdevelopment are what I intend to assess as a part of my business idea validation.

Mine was not meant to insult or ridicule you. It was more directed at those who wondered whether your OP was serious, genuine, competent, informed, arrogant, or simply trolling. It seems that many of us 'old hands' at PPRUNE are only too happy to comment on any topic as long as it is related to rotorcraft. My point was that it could even be a Bot that gives us prompts, we would still welcome the opportunity to express our views or share our war stories.

I could point to many OPs that on face value seem entirely naive, yet we answer. Mostly with a lot of patience, and often the ensuing discussions take turns and allow senior members to debate nuances of answers provided that the OP certainly had no idea existed. So it becomes a learning opportunity for all of us.

You have used this word at least twice - it is actually a kind of bail. A legal term. I think you mean ‘reconnaissance’.

Thank you for the contribution! That mistake did elude me. Oh well, English is my third language and I am a perpetual student of it. Perhaps this is why the study of an additional foreign language does not seem intimidating to me.

This gets better the OP speaks 3 languages and has $15m to throw down the drain I can smell the BS from here.

Didn’t the OP ask for the thread to be closed a while back?

To be fair, 3 languages in the non-english speaking world is pretty common..it's just us English speakers who reckon it's weird!

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Try one of these, but you'll need to double your budget just for the purchase and do without any training at all...
Best of luck, Walter!

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