Making Airborne Public Safety Easier

Our bread and butter has been electronic news gathering. So we fly for the vast majority of the major news networks in the country. We have a fleet of just over 60 helicopters. The vast majority of those are Bell products, and now we're entering the airborne public safety space. My name is Ryan Harbison. I'm the Vice President of Business Development and Corporate Strategy for Helicopters Incorporated. What we do in our electronic news gathering or ENG business, we're providing a turnkey solution. So what we're saying is we're coming to a news entity and saying, look, you may want to employ the photojournalist, and we're gonna do everything else for you. We're gonna take that aircraft off your hands. We're gonna own the asset, we're gonna insure it, we're gonna pilot it, we're gonna maintain it. Electronic news gathering and airborne public safety really have a lot of parallels in both. You need high quality aircraft, a high degree of reliability, quickly responding to an incident, getting the helicopter there, orbiting the scene, taking the video, sending that information, in most cases, to a news network as quickly as possible. And so what we're gonna do is provide that same level of service, that same responsiveness to the airborne public safety segment. Get to the scene quickly, take that video, send it down to the command desk or whoever needs that information, and do that reliably. Our hope in entering the airborne public safety space is to be able to offer a technological solution using cellular technology, using satellite technology. That eliminates a lot of the difficulties, a lot of the cumbersome expenses that are associated with traditional microwave video feeds and simplifies the solution for the law enforcement entity. And a big part of that is a partnership with Bell, where we say, together, let's put you in a great helicopter that has an excellent track record in terms of safety, reliability, and maintenance support. And then bring in an entity like Helicopters Inc., that has 40 years of experience maintaining those aircraft, operating those aircraft, and taking care of the equipment associated with providing a high quality feed down to the patrolmen on the ground. And if we can do those things together, I think it's gonna really move the needle in the law enforcement space by working with Bell and bringing Bell aircraft to the market. And then our operational support and our ability to provide this turnkey solution, we can really fit whatever mission set is important for the airborne public safety sector. So you have the 505, lower operating costs, high endurance times, great speed for a smaller aircraft, but it's gonna be slower than a 407, for instance, which is really gonna get you where you need to go very quickly with a high payload. And then if you want to jump to a twin-engine option like the 429, we can support that as well, and that really has all of the bells and whistles that somebody might want. Depending on the mission set that agency is trying to provide, we can really tailor our solution utilizing a Bell aircraft to whatever it is that that particular entity needs to accomplish their mission on a daily basis. There's a reason that we use almost entirely Bell helicopters. Certainly having consistency across our fleet is important for us. It gives us certain efficiencies, but a lot of it's because we found that the Bell aircraft, we can keep those flying more days in a calendar year than we can with any other manufacturer. And at the end of the day, what our customer cares about is safety and reliability. Bell's done an outstanding job of supporting us. I think since the early 1980s, our relationship with Bell has been very strong. And today we continue to invest in Bell aircraft.