Quiet Achievers

Two decades later Becker Helicopters is a significant company with 70 staff and 18 helicopters delivering up to 15,000 flying hours training 100 pilots a year. It is one of the southern hemisphere’s largest and busiest helicopter flying schools and, according to Bell, is now the world’s largest civilian operator of the 206B-3 JetRanger, with 15 of the type online.

But Becker Helicopters, with Mike as chief pilot and chief flying instructor and Jan (herself a commercial helicopter pilot and now a board member of the Helicopter Association International) as chief executive, was no overnight success.

“Those formative years were quite tough, which we soon realised was the norm for an aviation business. In today’s environment of changing Mike Becker is chief pilot and chief flying instructor. technology, regulatory change and the main customer base now working in the mining industry, it is very hard to actually do well with a couple of R22s, so we had to think outside the box in how to offer our services. ” Taking off their ‘small helicopter school’ hats and thinking bigger saw the Beckers develop a strategic business plan based on providing advanced training for corporate and military clients, which would generate bigger student numbers.

Initial success came in securing a contract with a Middle Eastern country in 2008. “It took a lot of mud [to stick] on a lot of walls before we had one organisation take a chance on us,” said Becker. “It’s easy to say you can do something, but it’s a different thing to actually go out and deliver the product. But we were committed 100 per cent with all the money we made always going back into the company, back into our machinery and back into our people. That actually paid dividends because we were able to perform for the client. ”

A long way from home

The Beckers have developed a scalable training model that can takeon a large number of students for clients wanting to outsource their accelerated initial entry rotary wing (IERW) pilot training.

“We are finding that outsourcing is the model for military organisations around the world now,” said Becker. “Instead of wasting billions of dollars on creating their own infrastructure, purchasing helicopters and supplying instructor pilots dedicated only to training, they send their trainee pilots to us. ” Training international students to become military aviators can have its challenges. “In some instances, students can spend up to a year here learning English before they get airborne,” said Becker. “An ICAO level 3 to 4 in English is the minimum level needed for a commercial licence, and by the time they finish their course, students usually reach around level 5. ” Once competent in English, students will climb into a JetRanger’s right hand seat where they are taught the basics of helicopter flight. Progressing through navigation and a full IFR course, along with a night unaided phase, the students get to be fully IFR and night VFR trained before they start their NVG training. Prior to graduation, the students will also do some sessions of basic formation flying and advanced manoeuvring and handling techniques.

“We are imparting knowledge, skills and behaviours in accordance with each client’s requirements,” said Becker. “All of our students are a long way from home, they’re in a foreign country communicating in a foreign language and learning to fly helicopters – it’s a massive ask in anyone’s language. But they go home very proud of having achieved their aviator wings. ”

Under one roof

From maintenance to manuals, Becker Helicopters keeps every function it can control in-house, which further sets it apart from most other helicopter training organisations. For example the Beckers have written all of their own internal documentation, manuals, checklists and exam preparation collateral.

“Anything that was a cost centre and that we couldn’t control, we decided to turn into a profit centre and be a part of our business model,” said Becker. “Maintenance, we do; documentation, we do; intellectual property development, we do; the standardisation of instructors, we do. It was very important for us to manage everything 100 per cent in-house. ” To meet client requirements and to keeps costs at manageable levels, Becker Helicopters has standardised on the Bell 206B-3 JetRanger, which it rebuilds and maintains in-house. “When you are training to a militarystandard and to meet consistent quality in our training, it is very important that we not only standardise our instructors, but we standardise our platform,” said Becker. “If you don’t standardise your platform then you can’t standardise your training materials, your checklists or your processes and therefore you can’t standardise your output product. ”

We can now run through all the core training materials in the sim. MIKE BECKER

In the hangar

Becker Helicopters’ team of engineers is kept busy remanufacturing second-hand JetRangers. Each machine is zero timed and virtually new, an investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars before it is put on the flightline.

“There’s a lot of history in this hangar,” says director of maintenance, Michael Yip. “We’ve sourced JetRangers from quite a number of operators and have stripped them right back, rewired, repainted and fully refurbished them to a near-new factory condition and they are all standardised. At the same time we are configuring them with the avionics and equipment that we require and are making every helicopter in our fleet 100 per cent identical. ” So identical that each helicopter wears a different coloured painted band wrapped around its fuselage and engine cowling to help identifythem. “When you have them all lined up out on the flightline, apart from their VH regos, the alternate colour stripes helps us, and even the air traffic controllers in the tower, identify which helicopter is which,” says Yip. “We have made it so that no matter what helicopter the students are flying, they have exactly the same quality, reliability and capability as the other guy. This ensures their training is asconsistent as possible. ” Each of the NVG-certified JetRangers is fitted with Aspen Evolution 2000H multi-function and primary flight displays which interface with a two-axis Cobam HeliSAS, a Garmin G430W GPS, a Trig 31 ADS-B transponder and a Freeflight 4500 radar altimeter.

“This is a major investment for the company,” said Becker. “If we are putting ourselves up to deliver a product that no-one else can deliver we have got to do things that no-one else has done or is doing. We need to treat ourselves as a military unit and a military unit would not accept aircraft all configured differently trying to do the same job. ”

Knowing your product

Quality student output comes from quality instruction. Captain Scott Summers, a former Army special operations Black Hawk pilot, leads Becker Helicopters’ team of instructors and overall school operations. While some instructors are ex-military, Becker Helicopters has an extensive standardisation process for its instructors which can take up to a month to complete, irrespective of their experience and the number of hours in their logbook.

“We find some of the ex-military instructors are excellent because they have the right ethos – they know what the product is that we want to deliver and they have seen that side of it already,” said Becker. “By the same token, we have trained many civil pilots up over the last 20 years and they have turned into fantastic instructors now able to deliver a military standard aviator. ” New instructors will spend 10 hours in the JetRanger where they are taught Becker’s practical teaching style. Further, all instructors are night VFR and instrument rated, although not all join the company with thoseratings and so are trained in-house accordingly.

“We have a massive internal training burden just to be able to meet our commitments,” said Becker. “But again, that’s part of our success too. We’re not shy on doing that for the right people. It also provides an instructor with a bona fide career path. ” Nonetheless, Becker acknowledges instructors need to move on from time to time because instructing day in, day out, with a constant stream of students, can be a bit of a drain after three or four years.

“It’s not uncommon for an instructor to say ‘I need to go and do something different’,” he said. “I know we might lose them at some point, but we pay well and there’s job satisfaction. They love the flying, the qualifications and the skills they get here but they do need to break out and do something different occasionally. ” Given cultural differences and language barriers, a key consideration is matching instructor and student personalities. “You’re going to have instructors and students who occasionally don’t work well together,” said Becker. “We have to move on that very quickly. ” Becker Helicopters also likes to take on its own apprentice LAMEs who it can train up to its standards. “We’ll give the young people a go,” said Becker. “If they are the right person for the job – round peg, round hole – then in they go. Attitude and work ethic are the two most important things you can have. You could have the most highly qualified person who has no work ethic, then they’re not the person to have. But, if you have a person with no qualifications and wants to learn with a great work ethic and a good attitude, we’d take them anytime of the day. ”

In a sim

In April CASA awarded Level C certification for Becker’s own JetRanger flight simulator. Developed by affiliate company Off-Planet Simulation over an 18-month period, the fixed-base simulator features a realistic, full-sized JetRanger forward fuselage section fitted with the avionics displays and gauges, plus switches, a genuine cyclic, collective and anti-torque peddles representative of Becker’s 206B-3 JetRangers.

“Simulation is really important to us and it is important in the training cycle that the simulator replicates as much as possible the actual helicopter being used,” said Becker. “Because we modify all our own helicopters, we needed our simulators to mirror them 100 per cent. We can now run through all the core training materials in the simulator because it has such high fidelity. This makes our training much more efficient and productive. ” A continuous visual display provides a 210-degree lateral and 68-degree vertical field of view projected on to a curved screen in front of the fuselage. “Everything about this simulator has a ‘real’ feel to it,” said Captain Kim Jorgensen, Becker Helicopters’ senior IFR instructor and a former military flight instructor who worked on Army’s Tiger ARH program.

“Students can conduct hovering, visual operations, inflight emergency training, including full engine-off touch down autorotations in this sim. Our dedicated simulation engineers have customised, re-programmed, modified and integrated the software together to work as an easy-to-use system with a single start-up, shut-down button. ” The simulator’s flight dynamics have been developed to replicate

We need to expand on our current model and form partnerships with OEMs. MIKE BECKER

the real helicopter as closely as possible using software from a UK-based company. The fidelity of the simulator will improve further once high definition projectors replace current VGA projectors.

Simulating aided night flight using NVGs is Becker Helicopters’ next big challenge. “Our sim guy, Lukas de Roo, is making our own NVG helmets with head tracking software,” said Jorgensen. “With the screen blacked out and looking though the goggles, students will see the visuals and still be able to use the cockpit instrumentation. A prototype night vision device being hand-made and using a 3D printer is currently in development. Once it’s fully functional, the device will clip to a student’s flight helmet, just like a real set, and will closely display what they will see. It will also allows us to simulate NVG emergencies such as black spots and single tube failures. It will certainly add to the simulator’s overall fidelity and capability. ” The simulator is currently approved by CASA for PPL, CPL, instrument training, IFR training and renewals, NVFR training, ATPL multi-crew cooperation and instructor training.

A range of variables can be added to challenge the students, and the sim can be paused allowing the instructor to talk the student through different aspects of the flight before resuming the ‘flight’.

The $1. 5 million JetRanger simulator is the first of four for Becker Helicopters, and is now awaiting final CASA approval for NVFR instructor training and visual circling approach training. Becker says the self-contained simulator, housed in a transportable purpose-built container, will soon be offered for purchase to other training organisations or operators.

Part 61

CASA’s recently introduced suite of civil aviation safety regulations, Part 61, has caused a few headaches across the industry. But for Becker Helicopters, Part 61 works for its large, integrated setup.

“I think Part 61 has some good things in it – it’s a complete mind shift on how we look at things now,” said Becker. “Though I think the implementation wasn’t done very well we have got four years to fix some things up during the transition period. And as long as CASA works with us to fix those things up, I think we can come out the other end ok. ” Becker has been working closely with CASA and with the rest of the helicopter industry on implementing some improvements and is pleased with the recent appointment of the regulator’s new director of safety Mark Skidmore. “He seems to be willing to listen and has directed his employees to start listening to us,” said Becker.

“CASA has been very good of late in sitting down with us as a group and individually and trying to fix the problems. The Australian helicopter industry has been treated like the poor cousin with fixed-wing rules modified with the word ‘helicopter’. But I think the recent progress made with the low-level rating is an example of a positive step in the right direction. ”

No place like home

Walking along the flightline while a quadrant of JetRangers start up for another training sortie, Becker talks of the future. While the company still does some utility work on the side, Becker Helicopters’ main focus is training large groups for big clients and it is firmly focusing on expanding its training programs. “We need to expand on our current model and form partnerships with OEMs because we can deliver the IERW and transition training in their products,” said Becker.

The Beckers have recently returned from the US where they formed a relationship with MD Helicopters to offer training in the MD500 series helicopters. Additionally, while visiting Bell Helicopter’s 407 assembly plant in Piney Flats, Tennessee they also finalised the configuration of their first two 407GXPs, which are due to arrive on the Sunshine Coast in mid-2016.

“We are going to expand both in Australia and in the USA,” said Becker. “We have a LLC company based in America and we’ll have some mobile training teams that can go into a foreign country to do some top-up training. The goal is to have the primary basic training always here in Australia because that is our core training base. ” Becker is adamant that Australia is the best environment in the world to train pilots. “We don’t have the airspace issues that they have overseas because our population base is so small,” said Becker. “We have guaranteed sunshine here and excellent expertise in the country. This is a great benefit to our current and future clients. ” Those future clients will surely come. From a single Bell 47 in 1996 to today’s internationally recognised IERW training provider, Becker Helicopters is a great example of how a vision and hard work can lead to success in business – as its awarding of the 2013 Telstra National Medium Business of the year shows.

Says Mike Becker: “We’ve got some good plans for the future and we want to make them happen for everyone who has been part of this company’s success. ” Clearly there is more to come for the Beckers – watch this space.