Romancing on Air : Nighttime Helicopter Rides Over Los Angeles Offer Lovers and Others a Zoom With a View

Though it levitates out of Van Nuys Airport with the gusting winds and resounding thwacka thwack sound of a helicopter ride, to Heli LA’s Nigel Turner, it’s really part of a light show. “The biggest light show in the world,” he calls it.

Forget about Paris, as far as Turner is concerned, Los Angeles is the City of Light.

Formerly a helicopter pilot in the British Army, for the past five years, Turner, 34, has been in the business of selling a view of the lights from 1,000 feet.

Each year, about 10,000 people board his Bell Jetranger and Longranger helicopters for flights over the city. His passengers range from tourists with Disneyland-fatigued feet to romantics looking to put a little extra pizazz into an anniversary or date.

“We’re bringing a lot of tourist dollars to the Valley,” Turner said.

More like tourist yen, francs and pounds--55% of his customers are foreign visitors, and about half of those are from Japan. Tourists like Oji Saito of Tokyo, who said through a translator, “Our tour group leader told us it was too dangerous to go outside at night in Los Angeles. So we decided to go for a night flight.”

Or Joan Hull of Essex, England, who marveled at the expanse of the Los Angeles Basin and “how the roads are all so straight. At home, they’re all winding and curvy.”

Most of these vacationers, while in their home countries, bought a package from a tour operator that included a van ride from their hotel to the Van Nuys Airport, dinner at a nearby restaurant and a 20-minute helicopter ride over Hollywood and Beverly Hills for between $99 and $130.

“I’m beginning to wonder whether having dinner before the flight was such a good idea,” said Valerie Fisher of Wiltshire, England.

She had nothing to worry about. Most of the passengers leaving the flights have the flushed, excited expression of a M*A*S*H crew jumping out of a chopper after a mission.

Turner said he’s never had a passenger injury and added that flying in helicopters is safer than flying in fixed-wing crafts. “People think it’s the other way around, but these birds are incredibly safe,” he said.

Safety might reassure the passengers, but it’s generally the thrill of floating over miles of lights that gets them interested in the first place. Jeff Steiman, 25, of Los Angeles brought along his 12-year-old brother, Mitchell, after experiencing the ride for the first time last year. “It’s completely different from a plane,” Steiman said. “A plane is like flying in a bus, riding a helicopter is like riding a bicycle in the sky.”

To enhance the bicycle-in-the-sky effect, Heli LA pilots sometimes play the music from “E.T.,” the part where Elliott takes off with the extraterrestrial in his bike basket. They avoid Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” from “Apocalypse Now,” which Turner deems “too aggressive” for this type of flight.

After all, it’s frequently romance the company is trying to promote, and creating the right mood is critical.

“What we see is a lot of men buying flights for dates,” Turner said, “and then it’s usually women who buy them for wedding anniversaries.”

Turner has a theory that flights have some aphrodisiac effect. “You should hear some of the stories the limo drivers tell,” he said. Richard Harris, now the ramp manager who loads passengers, had once been a driver and said that some people take the flight “very intimately.”

Aside from romance in the limos, there have been about 300 wedding proposals in the air as well as two marriages. The marriage that stands out most in Turner’s mind was the divorced couple who decided to remarry.

“They had a party at the restaurant, didn’t tell anyone what they were going to do, left for the flight and came back married,” Turner said. “The minister had a script that had something to do with flying and life. The pilot was the witness. I was quite moved by it.”

The usual destination on one of the romance-centered flights is the Tower Restaurant on the 32nd floor of the Transamerica building downtown. According to the Helicopter Assn. International in Washington, a nonprofit trade

group, Los Angeles is one of just a few cities in the United States where helicopters can land on a skyscraper with a top-floor restaurant.

In Los Angeles, for $299 apiece, the romance seekers are picked up at home by limo and driven to the Tower, where a candlelight dinner included in the price is waiting. They are escorted to the roof by a security guard, then flown off the helipad for the flight to Van Nuys and a limo drive home.

It’s quite a ride. Aside from the feeling of being rescued in a remake of “The Towering Inferno,” there’s the drama of suddenly lifting off, then swooping below the level of the other skyscrapers at 120 m.p.h.

“Lots of people tell me it feels like levitating in a chair,” said pilot Wayne Richardson of Sylmar. But chairs do not do things like this. They don’t race above the Harbor Freeway, turn right at the Music Center, soar past the New Otani Hotel, rise over the top of the circular, new First Interstate Building and take off toward Dodger Stadium.

“There’s a saying among pilots that planes fly themselves 95% of the time, but in a helicopter you fly it 95% of the time,” Richardson said.

Brian and Betty Gardiner of Moorpark recently celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary in flight. The Gardiners decided on the anniversary journey after Betty found the helicopter service listed in a guide book.

“I was looking for a restaurant, and I found this,” she said. What clinched the idea was the one, crucial prerequisite that separates a flight for marrieds from one for a first date: “We lucked out and got a good baby-sitter,” Betty Gardiner said.

They also lucked out in that the evening was clear enough that they could make out the details on the Griffith Observatory, Mann Chinese Theater and a car stalled on the Hollywood Freeway.

The helicopter service has the sky almost to itself, except for police choppers flying at a much lower altitude and the bank helicopters that shuttle checks and deposits around the city. There are also choppers from a competing company, Helinet, that fly the same routes.

“The first thing people notice are all the swimming pools,” said Richardson, flying by the Hollywood sign and passing Universal City en route to the Valley. Ventura Boulevard, Sherman Oaks Fashion Square and the incandescent lights of car dealerships on Van Nuys Boulevard stream by before the helicopter dips over the airport.

“It’s like you’re floating in the sky,” Betty Gardiner said. “It all looks a lot cleaner from up here.”

A recently repainted white triangle sits in the center of the 90-by-90-foot helipad where a ground crewman with a flashlight marks the spot where the chopper should land. The Gardiners step slowly off the machine, its blades still rotating.

“There’s only one thing left to decide,” she said. “What do we for the 25th anniversary?”