Helical Lands a Business Teaching Japanese Pilots

Flight instructor Dan Benton doesn’t speak Japanese. Student pilot Hiroshi Kato barely speaks English.

But with surprising ease--and a lot of hand gestures--the two men took off recently from Van Nuys Airport in a tiny two-seat helicopter, Kato at the controls, for a 70-mile training flight to Santa Barbara.

One of Benton’s fellow instructors, Ed Mauldin, watched the helicopter disappear into an overcast sky as he explained how instructors have learned to adjust their teaching methods at Helical, a Van Nuys flight school that is cashing in on the need for pilots in a burgeoning Japanese helicopter industry.

“There’s a lot of sign language,” Mauldin said. “Lots of hand movements. Gradually, it gets better.”

Apparently so. Since stumbling upon the Japanese market a year ago, Helical now receives about half of its students from Japan, said company President Bill Tucker. The school already has trained about 25 Japanese students and has another 20 in training. “We could have many more if we had machines to accommodate them,” Benton said.

Tucker is already planning to add to Helical’s four-helicopter fleet to meet the demands of Japanese students, who stay in Van Nuys from three to five months to earn a private pilot’s license. Kato, a strapping 19-year-old sent by his father’s company, is like most students. He will obtain a commercial license back in Japan and fly for private industry.

“Some of these people have jobs waiting for them when they get back to Japan,” Tucker said.

Training costs vary, depending on the length of a student’s stay, but a full 13-week course at Helical costs $18,990, Tucker said. And that doesn’t include air fare from Japan to Los Angeles or the housing the company provides at an apartment complex a short walk from the airport.

Even so, said 22-year-old Hiro Tsuno, it is far cheaper to train in the United States than in Japan, where instructors and even helicopters are in short supply. Tucker said he’s been told that training a single pilot in Japan costs about $90,000.

Thanks to high overhead costs in Japan, along with a strong yen and a weak dollar, America has emerged as an ideal training ground for pilots needed to fulfill an ambitious plan by the Japanese government and industry to build 600 heliports throughout the archipelago nation by the mid-1990s.

The plan, called Heliport Highway 600, calls for 540 land-based and 60 offshore heliports, said Kathleen Kocks, associate editor of Rotor & Wing International, a trade publication based in Peoria, Ill., with a worldwide circulation of 40,000. Every other week, she said, the magazine’s Tokyo correspondent reports that another company or two has submitted an application to the government to build a heliport.

“As of a year ago, they may have had only four public-use heliports,” Koch said.

The Japanese view helicopters as a convenient and fast alternative to crowded highways and trains, Kocks said. Heliports also take little space, an important consideration in a Montana-sized country where mountains cover three-fourths of the land.

The push for helicopters in Japan started in 1982 when the government deregulated the aviation industry to encourage more commuter markets to grow, Kocks said. Helicopter imports have risen substantially. In 1984, the country imported 44 helicopters, Rotor & Wing International reported. Last year, the country imported 150 helicopters.

How did Helical cash in on the Japanese helicopter boom?

By accident. “It was something that was dumped into our lap,” said Tucker, a native of Tasmania who once flew planes for the Australian army before coming to the United States in 1982.

Taught Actor

Tucker started the business three years ago with the help of a former student, actor Roger Mosley, who leased Tucker a helicopter that Mosley had purchased with his earnings as a regular on the television series “Magnum, P.I.” Mosley portrayed a helicopter pilot on the series.

Last April, an American businessman with relatives in Japan contacted Tucker to inquire about training a few pilots. The business just grew from there, he said.

Tucker, 36, said much of the credit for the school’s Far East business goes to his partner, Ken Obi, who came to the United States from Japan 11 years ago. Obi, 30, is a flight instructor who also helps students with limited English.

Instructors and students agreed that English is the toughest part of the course.

“Their reading and writing is pretty decent,” Benton said. Their conversational English, however, is sometimes nonexistent, he said.

Learning English

When asked if his English had improved since arriving in Los Angeles a month ago, Tsuno looked to Omi for a translation. He smiled. “A little,” he said.

Still, Tucker insisted, training flights are perfectly safe. Each helicopter has a dual set of controls, much like a driver-training car with an extra steering wheel, and instructors can quickly correct any mistakes, he said. Tucker proudly added that all of Helical’s students have passed the written English test needed for their private pilot’s license.

“Before we let anybody solo, they have to understand the commands the tower would give a student,” Tucker said.

Language barriers generally slow down the training, Mauldin said. Most American students solo after 22 hours of training. The Japanese students solo after about 32.

Cultural Variations

But the formality and discipline of Japanese culture also give the overseas students a distinct advantage over their American counterparts, he said. Flying a helicopter requires a delicate touch on the cyclic, or control stick, he said.

Often from the first flight, the Japanese have a light but steady control of the cyclic. “They are not like the American students, where everything is roughly done. You really can tell the culture,” he said.

He agreed with Obi, who said Japanese students generally learn faster in the air than when reading their English textbooks. Kato, speaking through an interpreter, said his first few months in America were difficult. He has studied at Helical since November and hopes to take his final test in a month.

He and Obi laughed as Kato recalled a simple but surprising realization when arriving in Los Angeles. “Everybody speaks English!” he said.