In the 1950s, air travel was booming, airplanes were getting bigger,
intercity air travel was on the rise and cities were getting more congested.
This created a problem of long commute times for short-haul travelers.
To give an example, if you commute between New York and Boston, it would require the following:
First, you have to arrive at JFK airport at least an hour early if you wanted to bring more than a
carry-on, and it will take you on average about 40 minutes to do so. Then you checking your bag,
go through security checks, then you get to sit at the gate and wait,
hoping the flight isn't running late. Finally, you get on the plane and wait again and again
due to ground delays. But once you get up in the air,
the flight time is hard to beat in a helicopter. Arriving in Boston however, is another story,
taxi times are an average of 5 minutes, but can go much higher. Getting off the plane usually
takes another 5 minutes unless you sat at the exit row, then you make a long walk to baggage claim,
which takes about 10 minutes. After all that, you leave the airport for half an hour's drive
to downtown Boston. From door to door, assuming everything is on time, that's about 4 hours.
The problem with super short flights isn’t the flight itself, but the hassle
of getting to the airport, and leaving the airport to your destination after landing,
even though your flight time is just one hour, when you put together time you spent on the
road getting in and out of airports, you will realize you have been on the road for over four
hours, and here is where helicopter airlines came in:
by using a helicopter, the journey of almost four hours is reduced to 1hr, 30 minutes because you
are taking off from a rooftop in Manhattan to the rooftop of where you are going in downtown Boston.
In the late 1940s, Los Angeles Airways was the first to commence an airmail service,
followed by scheduled passenger service in November 1954,
making it the world's first scheduled helicopter airline. The main hub was Los
Angeles International Airport, where passengers were flown to and from local area heliports,
including Disneyland Resort and the new Porter Resort in Newport Beach. During this period the
helicopter airlines experienced a significant boom as inter-city transportation was easier and
relatively cheap, and there was a lot of hope and potentials in the helicopter airlines industry.
But after 10 years in service, these airlines disappeared, what went wrong?
Well, it turned out that nothing went wrong, but during those periods,
none of these helicopter airlines were making money out of flying passengers
because helicopters were simply too inefficient, too expensive, can’t go fast enough, can’t carry
enough people to bring per-seat costs down and the only way helicopter airlines could break even
was through government subsidies which helped them offset operational costs.
However, by 1965, the subsidy was gone, and helicopter airliners began to face
a lot of challenges. Los Angeles airways, Chicago helicopter airways,
New York Airways, and other major airlines failed. They couldn’t keep up with balancing their books
and generating profits became a problem. This in turn forced them all to pack up.
It is evident to note that one of the major reasons why wide adoption of helicopter airlines
has not been witnessed since its prediction can be attributed to the cost of operation.
Helicopters tend to be more expensive compared to fixed-wing airplanes that offer the same
seating capacity or range and speed. A small two-seat helicopter may cost about $300 per hour
while a large helicopter may cost $500 per hour to operate. Travelers also cover standby costs,
landing fees, and taxes. When landing at a major airport, the landing fees may reach up to $250.
Standby costs average about $200 per hour while taxes are often about 7.5% of the total.
Fuel is a large portion of the cost of operating a helicopter, the average cost of fuel is $4.50
to $7.00 per gallon depending on the city, resulting in $27 to $120 per hour in fuel costs.
Another $30 to $50 per hour covers the pilot’s pay.
The remaining costs cover maintenance and insurance. Compared to airplanes, the cost of
maintaining and insuring helicopters is often much higher. More aircraft crashes involve
helicopters than any other type of aircraft, which increases the cost of insurance.
Using Bell B206 as an example, the 206 costs about 600$ per hour to operate. Don’t also forget that
the pilot will be paid too, there is a cost of landing, cost of managing the helicopter
airline amongst other basic costs. This in total would run to some thousands of dollars
per hour flight. What this means is that a helicopter like this would cost at least
thousands of dollars per hour to operate when you put the variable and fixed costs together,
but it can only sit about 4-6 passengers per flight.
Now, as mentioned before that, the reason these airlines couldn’t breakeven
is that helicopters were simply too inefficient, too expensive, can’t go fast enough, can’t carry
enough people to bring per-seat costs down. Fairey Aviation introduced the Fairey Rotodyne to
tackle this problem and their mission was simple: to design a helicopter faster than anything ever
existed, bigger, more fuel-efficient, costs less than a plane to maintain,
and will make helicopter airlines industry profitable. It was easier said than done.
The Rotordyne wasn't just a better helicopter, with improved speed,
range, and efficiency, it was a revolutionary helicopter. It was more like a helicopter and
a plane joined together with photoshop, because it has the basic features of a helicopter like a main
rotor and the basic features of a plane; like wings and engines in tractor configuration.
It was a lot more revolutionary, it is a hybrid rotorcraft, known as a compound gyroplane or
Gyrodyne and it doesn't work like a conventional helicopter. A conventional helicopter uses engine
power to spin a rotor blade, which forces air down to great lift. Tilting the rotor is what allows
the helicopter to move in a given direction. But the Rotordyne works entirely differently,
in its case, the main rotor isn't powered by an engine like in a normal helicopter,
also; there is no tail rotor to keep it stable like in a normal helicopter.
For takeoff, landing, and hovering, the rotor was driven by tip-jets at the end
of each rotor blade. How it works is that a compressed air supplied by the turboprops
would ignite to spin up the rotor. Once in forward flight, the tip jets will be shut
off and the rotor would spin freely by the force of the relative wind. With this unique design,
the Rotordyne flew faster than any helicopter in the world, and it was far more efficient.
But the compromise came at a cost. Eliminating the use of engines to power the main rotor in-place
of tip-jets made the Rotordyne very noisy, and this noise comes from the tip-jets. And that
was a serious problem because the Rotordyne is meant to solve the problem of intercity travel,
not create more problems, 8 out of every 10 people preferred the long commutes,
rather than have a noisy flying machine over their city.
Fairy aviation went back to the drawing board to fix this problem, and this time,
they are not making another prototype, instead, this improved model will be a production version.
The improved model was larger, more capable, more efficient, could carry up to 75 passengers,
and it promised to be quieter by 15%, Airlines were interested and orders were coming in from
around the world, which is promising for a new design that hasn’t proved itself.
But it was at this point Fairey aviation started facing problems.
To get the production version built, about $10 million more in funding would be needed from
the British government, but the government has already lost interest in the project,
and because of this, Fairey Aviation never got the money.
The reason the government withdrew from the project is that, in the 60s,
Britain's aviation industry was a mess. There were too many aircraft builders,
but they weren’t making sales, they heavily relied on government-sponsored projects and
subsidies to stay in business, and the government was losing a lot of money,
to solve this problem, the solution the government came up with was to force these companies,
including Fairey aviation to merge and the Rotordyne project wasn’t taken seriously
by the new management, the chose to pursue more promising helicopter projects instead.
In 1962, the British government was facing economic pressures, and they needed to cut
down expenses, they considered the Fairey Rotodyne as a white elephant
project and decided to pull funding for the development, and the dreams of the
half helicopter half-plane that promising to revolutionize intercity travel was put to an end.
In summary, the reason why helicopters are not used widely for commercial travel
can be summarized in three major reasons:
1. Helicopters are VERY expensive to operate. Up to several times more expensive per flight hour
as compared to a conventional fixed-wing aircraft. On large helicopters, one hour
of flight time can result in several hours of maintenance which increases turnaround times.
2. Helicopters are slow. Due to a helicopters’ lifting system, there is a trade-off of hover
performance and efficiency vs speed. The smaller your rotors the higher your top speed in theory,
but the less you hover, the more fuel you burn. 3. Helicopters are LOUD. Very loud. Especially
large helicopters. This is not compatible with many airport’s noise abatement regulations,
which limits where they fly. Helicopters are great,
but they are a transportation system of last resort. Almost any other mode of transport
will get you there either cheaper, faster or in greater comfort. But there are situations where
nothing else can do what a helicopter does, and for those situations it’s perfect.
So, do you think helicopter airlines will come back in the future?
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