Firm Too Busy to Start Copter Commuter Plan
In April, ACL Technologies Inc. said it had a solution to highway gridlock: fly its employees by helicopter over the choked freeways between Orange County--where ACL is located--and San Bernardino and Riverside counties, where many of its workers live.
The Santa Ana company figured it could offset the cost of chartering a helicopter by asking a dozen or so employees to work an extra hour each day at no pay. Commuting by copter suddenly seemed like an option for the common man.
But that was six months ago. Now it is October and--you’ll pardon the expression--the program has yet to lift off. And there is some irony in the reason why.
Surge in Business Halted Plan
What happened, according to ACL, is a surge in demand for what the company makes: equipment for testing airplane parts. That has kept all the company’s cash tied up in buying inventory to keep the assembly line moving at a rapid clip. There isn’t much cash left over, ACL officials said, for the $60,000 to $80,000 that the company estimates it would take to get the helicopter program off and running and keep it going for a year.
So stiff is demand that ACL’s sales are up 50% over last year, officials of the privately held company said. That would be about $36 million in sales this year.
The reason for the jump is simple. The airplane manufacturers also have huge backlogs of orders. The airlines--unable to buy as many planes as they need--must keep as many of their older planes in the air as much as possible. And that means their ground crews need lots of ACL’s testing equipment.
That’s the good news. Now for the bad: ACL underestimated how complicated local, state and federal regulations governing helicopters can get.
Before it gave its OK, for instance, the Federal Aviation Administration wanted to know whether there were any smokestacks, churches, schools and the like in a one-mile radius around ACL’s scruffy industrial neighborhood in Santa Ana. That’s a lot of territory, and Sales Manager Greg Ward--whose idea this was--had to turn out at lunch hour and drive around surveying the neighborhood.
City Hoped for a Cleanup
The company also needed a permit from the city to turn its back parking lot into a landing pad. The city, according to ACL, dangled the permit as bait to get the company to spruce up its headquarters. Estimated cost of the cleanup, according to ACL, was $100,000.
After negotiating with the city, “we eventually got it down to planting a row of trees out front and some other minor stuff,” Ward said. The estimated cost now is less than $50,000, he added.
That was back in the spring. Then ACL’s orders took off and the company backed off on taking out a city permit right then. Once that’s obtained, the company still needs a state permit to operate a heliport.
Still, sales manager Ward says the figures make sense and the company will probably be operating the helicopter service in six months or so.
Here’s how Ward figures the economics of the thing: The company picked employees for the helicopter pool who are making at least $40,000. That means they cost the company at least $19 an hour in salary. ACL also estimated that each of those employees cost it another $19 an hour in indirect costs such as benefits, taxes, insurance and vacation.
Paper Savings of $456
If 12 of these employees worked one free hour a day, the company would have a paper savings of $456 daily. Ward found a nice, inexpensive charter service with a four-passenger helicopter that agreed to fly the 12 employees back and forth from Riverside and San Bernardino counties to Santa Ana in three trips in return for a guarantee of steady business. The price: $403 a day, for a savings on paper of $53 a day.
If it works--and it is far from certain yet that it will--it would be the first such airborne commuting program in Southern California.
Back in the spring, when all things seemed possible, Ward was talking about eventually adding more helicopters and more employees to the program. There were, he said, even bigger possibilities: offering the service to other companies and coming up with a nice little sideline business for ACL.
Some Southern California companies might be interested.
The South Coast Air Quality Management District has ordered Southern California’s larger businesses to reduce the number of trips employees make to the plant or office through car-pooling and similar alternatives. If they fail to comply, they are faced with huge fines.
In addition, it could help some companies in recruitment. It is sheer misery these days trying to hire engineers and other technical employees because the high housing costs in Los Angeles and Orange counties make newcomers balk. And if employees buy a more affordable house in Riverside or San Bernardino, as thousands of other families have done, they are faced with a monstrous commute to their jobs.
Turned Down 3 Times
“We’ve been turned down three times in the last month by engineers we’ve tried to hire,” Ward said. “They look at the home prices, or the length of the commute, and say ‘Forget it.’ It’s turned into a real problem.”
So there is lots of pressure on ACL and other companies to come up with some way around the horrendous commutes faced by their workers each day. The benefits of the helicopter plan, for instance, outweigh the potential dangers, Ward said. According to his statistics, the company can expect to face a helicopter accident only once in every 43 years.
And facing that danger may be preferable to the not inconsiderable danger and slow daily torture of Orange County’s legendary traffic jams. For now, though, ACL workers won’t get to find out.
