For our Perspectives series, we talk to experienced business aviation industry professionals, who share with us their unique insights and offer a window into their world. This month's interviewee is Dustin Dryden, founder and chairman of MyHeli. MyHeli is part of the Volare Aviation Group, for which Dryden is also founder and chairman, and it received its own AOC at the end of September this year. Having previously grown large fixed wing management company Hangar 8, which merged with Gama Aviation in 2015, and subsequently established Volare, Dryden is hoping for similar success in the rotary arena.

“This year has been a tiny bit more entertaining than originally thought – but it’s all part of the process. I’ve flown helicopters for 20 years and have had them for a long time. I (and my organisation) have been fairly disruptive historically with a fixed wing management business. We had huge success there, and we were one of the first public companies in the sector, which we sold and reversed out of, after growing a very large management company very quickly. Since then, other people have come into that industry and grown even bigger companies. We’d like to think that we were one of the earlier disruptors.

We’ve looked at the helicopter industry in detail, and we felt that there was potential to take a similar approach. We’ve gone down the route of being able to maintain the aircraft ourselves and we have an engineering training school for the aircraft. The only missing piece of the puzzle was to have an AOC to run them off. We are very much of the view that having an organisation that can provide a complete turnkey solution to anybody who wants to own a helicopter is the only way to go in this industry, and there are not that many organisations who are capable of managing a helicopter, chartering it, maintaining it, buying it and selling it, and also providing training on it. There’s only one other such organisation that I can think of in the UK. We wanted to bring a slightly more modern take on that, using more technology, being able to book over an app for example. There was a huge opportunity within this industry to modernise it and make it more accessible to more people, and this is something that we have got a history of doing well in the fixed wing world.

Coronavirus hit during the invention of all this, and I think the fallout from the virus is that it has created an even larger, better customer base to which we can provide this level of service. It’s definitely driven customers that wouldn’t have used a helicopter to travel certain distances. Being able to travel with two to six people, in your own bubble, separated from the pilots and separated from the general public is a good thing, as is being able to do hops in to Europe as and when we are allowed to, along with Scotland. We’ve also seen with lots of places that travelling is difficult nowadays due to heavy traffic, because nobody wants to use public transport. I think all it’s done is open up the market and made it more accessible to a whole new client base. Our feeling is that our timing has been perfect.

At the moment we have six Agusta 109s. We favour them because they are very quick, getting up to almost 200mph in a straight line. It’s a full IFR aircraft with very good lifting capacity. If you are hopping around the centre of the UK, you’re usually no more than 30 minutes away from anything, which allows you to be pretty dynamic with what you’re doing. They also have pretty good fuel carrying capacity, so you can hop around the place without needing to go and refuel. Because they have got such phenomenal single engine performance, you can carry a lot of weight too, not to mention a huge margin of safety in the flight operation envelope. We think it’s a great product, they are well priced for what they do, we can support them all in-house and we carry a very large supply of spare parts in our maintenance facility. We have been looking after them, painting them and refurbishing the interiors for several years now, so it’s a product we know very well.

We are based in Oxford, so we can pretty much get to anywhere in the UK non-stop. We can go to Brussels or Paris for example, so as an operational base, we are in an excellent position. We have a very close relationship with Oxford airport, so we can operate whenever we want to. The airport owners also happen to own Battersea Heliport, which gives us a lot of flexibility in our operations there too.

Any aviation businesses I’ve ever got involved with have scope for modernisation in their approach, and scope for transparency in the way you deal with customers, so that they have a product or a technology available to them at the right price point. Its a winning combination to have a booking app and a single pilot single engine helicopter at a sensible price point; you put all that together in a package and you are able to deliver a very decent product at a sensible price. If you can get all of this to a position where it is as easy as booking an Uber – something that I don’t believe the industry does very well for helicopters at the moment – there’s a huge marketplace. Even from the short amount of time that we have been flying people around on an AOC, the demand for it is very much from people who are new to it, so they have no expectations of how complicated historically it was to do it. It can be made so easy.”