The Hindu Business Line : Copters calling pilots as plane dreams wane

Bangalore, July 5 Is the helicopter gaining where the aeroplane is losing? In what seems like one more backlash of the aviation boom, flying aspirants are said to be rushing to turn helicopter pilots. Until three to five years ago, the goal was to get a commercial pilot licence (CPL) to fly the fixed-wing planes and land an airline job.

As airlines duck costs and ground planes and pilots, the rotary wing (the chopper) is the flavour (of the season), according to Wing Commander (Retd) Mr C.D. Upadhyay, IAF veteran, who heads the Rotary Wing Academy (RWA), the only civilian helicopter training school this side of the world.

For the first time in its eight years, the RWA, run by Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd, is seeing an unprecedented rise in the number of enquiries. Some are from commercial pilots wanting to re-train as copter pilots even at an additional Rs 15-20 lakh, he said.

Too early to tell

It may be too early to tag this as a trickle or a tide; clearly “the conversions to rotary wing are happening because the fixed-wing market (with airlines) is saturated,” Wing Commander Upadhyay, who is HAL’s Chief Test Pilot (Rotary Wing), remarked. The RWA trains eight to ten students a year and has produced 70 CHPL (commercial helicopter pilot’s licence) holders. This year, it received a record number of a few hundred queries. For the September 2008 batch, it has registered 15 and put some on hold.

As the bust across airlines unfolds, would-be career pilots like Ms Sujata Nirwan and Mr Naveen Kumar C. at RWA said they would rather fly copters than planes. Opportunities abound in in offshore oil rigs, mines, VVIP and corporate travel, air ambulances or heli-tourism bodies.

Currently, 197 registered copters are operated by around 50 commercial, private, corporate bodies, PSUs and State Governments — among them Pawan Hans, Global Vectra, Deccan Aviation and United Heli Charters.

Col. (Retd) H.S. Premkumar, Chief Flying Instructor at the Academy, and Group Captain (Retd) Sivalingam, its ground instructor, recalled that in the year 2000, RWA had 10 CPLs in a batch of 16. “Copter pilots are a seller’s market,” said Col. Premkumar. “Unlike CPLs there is never a glut of CHPLs. Our candidates are landing jobs as soon as they complete the mandatory 150 flying hours.”

Salaries of copter pilots have also levelled up with their fixed wing counterparts. An RWA pass-out has just landed a corporate job at Rs 1.7 lakh a month — this can double with two to three years of flying.

“No jetlag”!

The Directorate-General of Civil Aviation has declared 2008 as the year of the helicopter and wants 100 CHPLs trained each year. Ms Nirwan, who may soon become the country’s third woman CHPL, summed up copter-flying: “No jet lag from too much travel. I can enjoy the flying and the money it fetches.”

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Copters calling pilots as plane dreams wane