All in a Day's Work

Georgina Hunter-Jones

The life and instantaneous decisions made when flying as a Charter Pilot.

Flying with a friend last summer he asked me to land in his garden and pick up something he had forgotten. I did and as we were flying away he commented that he had previously asked a pilot on a commercial flight to land there and he refused. I had to explain that commercial pilots are not as free as private ones. Private pilots in Britain are used to the idea they can land anywhere large enough to take the helicopter (as long as they have the land-owner's permission and it is not in a built-up area) but for commercial pilots on a charter this is not so, there are certain regulations which mean the private pilot may actually be able to land in more restricted spaces than the commercial pilot.

"Commercial sites," says Simon Maynard of Biggin Hill Helicopters, "must be 300 metres by 100 metres." Since this sounds more like a small runway than a helicopter landing site he goes on to explain, that the actual landing area must be a minimum of 1.5 metres in diameter. The safety area 3 metres and the minimum width of the area 30 metres, with a take-off distance...