chopper pilot

Hey guys/gals. I'm just curious if any of you know of any corporate operators out there that fly both FW and helicopters? Dream job I guess you could say to be able to fly both.


thanks

galaxy flyer

Loads do--in BDL UTFlight and Mass Mutual Insurance. Quite a few in the NYC area, too.

GF

Starhospitality

Here are a few suggestions that I know have planes and helicopters:

AIG - Teterboro, NJ
Alticor/Amway - Grand Rapids, MI
American Express - Newburgh, NY
Cascade Investment - Kirkland, WA
CenturyLink - Monroe, LA & Englewood, CO
Citigroup - White Plains, NY
Duke Energy - Charlotte, NC
Emerson Electric - Chesterfield, MO
Exxon Mobil - Dallas, TX; Houston, TX & Fairfax, VA
GATX - San Francisco, CA
General Electric - Fairfield, CT
Gulf States Toyota - Houston, TX
Honeywell - Morristown, NJ
IBM - White Plains, NY
Johnson & Johnson - West Trenton, NJ
Kendall Jackson - Medford, OR
MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings - Teterboro, NJ
Massachusetts Mutual - Springfield, MA
Merck - West Trenton, NJ
Nextera Energy - Juno Beach, FL
Noble Drilling - Sugar Land, TX
Pfizer - West Trenton, NJ
Sanofi-Aventis - Morristown, NJ
SAS Institute - Cary, NC
S.C. Johnson & Son - Racine, WI
Sony - Teterboro, NJ
Travelers Indemnity - Windsor Locks, CT
United Technologies - Hartford, CT
Vulcan - Seattle, WA
Weyerhaeuser - Seattle, WA

mswmsw

Yeah, flying helos is a lot of fun, and flying both F/W and R/W keeps the monotony (at least for me) of F/W "gear up, autopilot on" type of flying at bay. Only thing is keeping different sets of numbers and procedures in your head.... makes it challenging at Recurrent time. At one point, I was keeping numbers and procedures in my head for two turbo-props, a jet, and a turbine helo...... plus a recip single. Older I got, the harder it was! I am out of the helo flying game now, and I do miss it....... but only have to keep the numbers in my head for one jet and one TP now, much easier!

landlover

I am and always have been a FW guy. However I have always wanted to get the helicopter certificates. Would anyone care to guess how much adding those ratings with minimal experience in a chopper would help in being hired at any of the aforementioned companies, specifically the companies in the NYC area.

NowCorporate

Likely not much.

IMO (from working at one of the above departments) and knowing people at many of the others...is that RW guys are hired with a lot of Sikorsky time and then are transitioned into an SIC jet position also.

They do this as many of these departments have pilots flying 2 types. They often have 2 types of aircraft, which covers all the Fixed wing guys, but need to get the chopper guys into a plane also. Quite often they wind up in the shorter range fixed wing (like a DA2000) Going the other way - FW to RW - is far less common. I only know one or two guys who have done this, and it was many years ago. I also know some just have RW guys flying the choppers, no airplanes.

Not that it can't happen?...

Good Luck!

Joebootx

I would agree with Now Corporate. Coming from learning airplanes first then adding on the helicopter ratings followed by 15 years of helicopter operations. Flown the gammit of helicopter operations (cattle herding, oil support, fire fighting, Navy contract, and now corporate). This biggest issue I see with trying to fly both helicopters and jets is the ability to gain experience. If you have a two pilot helicopter and you're rated perfect. If it is single pilot helicopter you will most likely not be able to gain enough flight time to meet the experience requirments for safety and insurance. Since most jets are two pilot it is much easier for a high time helicoper pilot to go the other way and fly as SIC under a high time jet captain. Jets also tend to fly more then helicopters in the corporate world which adds to the ability to gain time and experience quicker. Also, every helicopter pilot I know has their airplane ratings vs very few jet pilots who have helicopter ratings (industry wide). I acually don't know of any jet pilot who went on to become a career helicopter pilot. Most like myself go from helicopters to jets and realize the comfort, ease of operation and safety and stay in the jet. Another thing to consider is that many of the corporate operaters have very high flight time requirments for their aircraft captains whether helicopter or jet. This is another hurdle for a dual rated pilot to get past. Just my 2,3,4,5 cents worth. Good luck, it can be done!

nehringer

Here's a unique situation...I'm 43, high time helicopter pilot with several years corporate and part 135 after a career in the US Army. I'm a third generation pilot and have wanted to fly all my life. The open door presented itself through the US Army Warrant Officer/Flight Program back when I was an Airborne Infantryman. I ended up in helicopters and managed to earn an airplane PPL/Instrument on my own. I finally reached a point where I decided that if I didn't take advantage of an opportunity to finish my fixed wing qualifications now, I never would.

So, now here I am...Airplane and helicopter Commercial, Instrument, CFI/CFII single and multi-engine. I live in a virtual "aviation vacuum" and I drive two hours one way to work as a part time CFI. I barely have enough work to make the drive worth it. The company also owns a full motion AATD, so I'm not building a whole lot of actual flight time. Instructing is a good experience, but I spent 12 years as a US Army Standardization Pilot and Instrument Flight Examiner. The whole teaching experience is experience I already have a good deal of.

There is some magical disconnect among aviation professionals who still see helicopters as a mystical machine that doesn't really fly so much as it beats the air into submission and the "pilots" who operate them do so under some principle of physics that defies traditional aeronautical theory. In other words, a professional helicopter pilot with REAL FAR 135 experience, REAL IFR and carrying REAL passengers for over 6,000 hours is hugely under-qualified to go to work flying airplanes ANYWHERE with 200 hours in airplanes. I know that there is a difference in the way airplanes and helicopters take off and land. I also know that my aeronautical education was way more in depth than anything most civil pilots undergo. Earning airplane ratings with prior helicopter experience has been like falling out of bed. The converse of that is not quite as easy. Flying helicopters has been described as balancing an egg on its narrow end. Someone with experience only in tricycle gear airplanes would experience a higher degree of difficulty learning to fly a helicopter than any helicopter pilot ever does in learning to fly airplanes. This is not only based on my own personal experience, but based on experiences of hundreds of people I have known who have learned to fly both types in one sequence or the other.

Unfortunately, since all of my airplane ratings came as add-on's, I was able to earn each fixed wing rating right at the minimum aeronautical experience required by FAR 61. It frustrates me to no end to have to explain that to potential employers who ask, "How did you earn this rating with such low time"? That is, IF my resume even makes it to that point. I'm pretty sure my resume is not even taken seriously by most potential employers. After all, reality is often less believable than fiction.

Flying students and logging more IFR in a simulator is not going to enhance my employ-ability anymore than what it is now. But I don't see anyone handing me the keys to a twin anything with only 50 hours multi. Sure, I'm employable as a helicopter pilot, but I've done all I want to do in helicopters. I was absolutely miserable in my last helicopter job, but I was so dedicated to it that it cost me a marriage and a house. The job wasn't completely to blame; I had one of those trophy wives who consequently turned out to be the Devil. Either way, wives don't hang around very long when you spend all of your time either at work, or driving to and from.

The biggest nut to crack in my situation is convincing employers and insurance companies that a helicopter pilot is viable and relevant, and everything he/she knows is DIRECTLY transferable to piloting airplanes. I'm working on building a competitive number of hours in my log book, but the quality of those hours is entirely dependent on the type of aircraft I have an opportunity to fly. What's the next step here?

n20junkie

Think you have it bad, try explaining 2,600 hours of chinook flight engineer instructor time to people.

In short, i always add it to resume's and label it properly, and explain it if asked.

I was lucky to find an employer that liked my A&P/IA as well as my military background. They stuck me as a PIC in the companies small jet that I fly 100 percent single-pilot.

Personality goes a long way in the corporate world. People who claim insurance being the limiting factor, are usually just using that as an excuse. We got single pilot jet insurance, with a PIC having ZERO turbine fixed wing experiance, flying single pilot after 25 hours of SOE, for 15k a year, 10 mil of coverage.

USMCFLYR

So you are saying that this is NOT true?

You know this knife doesn't only cut in one direction.
Take the exact opposite candidate and tell me how successful s/he would be with a lot of FW experience and 200 hrs of helicopter time looking for a professional RW job flying corporate.

Since you are going to bring up the intricacies of flying the helicopter, I'll say that might be true of flying a small GA airplane, but you aren't looking for a good flying flying a C-172 are you? I'll tell you that a common problem I saw in helicopter transition guys in past past instructor experience was an inability of thinking far enough ahead of an airplane moving 8 miles a minutes - and that is just the flying part - not even the multi-dimensional maneuvering in space required for the mission. That is quite different than most civilian flying that you are going to be doing but acting like just any pilot can go from 200 hours in a C-152/172 and deciding that flying 'airplanes' is as easy as it gets is short sighted.

Btw - I know quite a few (not hundreds like you do, but enough to give me confidence) experienced airplane pilots that have also made the transition from flying FW to RW and they all made it. Heck - I even had a chance to fly a CH-53A back in the day for 1.5 hrs (with a whopping 200 or so FW hrs at the time) and the only thing I couldn't do was hover very well - - oh at that approach to landing was ugly and soon the controls were taken over by the pilot )

USMCFLYR