About helicopter.rentals
A helicopter charter concierge built around one idea: you should be able to check the company that is going to fly you, before you pay for it.
Why this exists
Helicopter charter is one of the few consumer purchases where the thing that matters most — whether the company selling you the flight is legally authorised to operate it — is both publicly verifiable and almost never shown to you. The FAA publishes the list of certificated operators and the aircraft on each certificate, and updates it every week. Practically nobody in the booking chain puts that in front of a customer.
Meanwhile illegal charter is a persistent, documented problem in this industry. The usual shape is not a villain; it is an aircraft owner or management company flying revenue trips on an aircraft that is not on a commercial certificate, under an arrangement that looks fine from the passenger seat and collapses the moment anything is tested. The person buying the flight has no easy way to tell.
So the premise here is narrow and, we think, defensible: publish the certificate number, say when we last checked it, and be explicit about what we did not check. That is a smaller promise than most of this market makes. It has the advantage of being true.
How we make money
We are the concierge, and we sit in the middle of the money on purpose. You pay helicopter.rentals one all-in price for the trip; we pay the operator their charter rate; the difference is our fee. One invoice, one company to call, and no reconciling a landing fee with one supplier and a positioning leg with another.
You should treat that disclosure with the same scepticism you would apply anywhere else, so here is the conflict it creates, stated plainly: because our fee is the gap between what you pay and what the operator charges, we have an incentive to widen that gap. Two things hold it honest. Ask us what our fee is on your quote and we will tell you — that is a standing commitment, not a concession we make when pushed. And we would rather lose a booking than put you with a cheaper operator we are less confident in, because the reason anyone uses us instead of calling an operator directly is that we checked.
We are not paid differently depending on which operator you end up with. If that ever changes, this page will say so before it takes effect.
What we are not
- Not an air carrier. We hold no operating certificate and we do not fly anyone. Taking your payment does not change that: every flight is operated by an independently certificated operator who retains operational control and is responsible for the conduct of the flight.
- Not a safety rating. Appearing in our directory means an operator's certificate checks out. It is not an audit, an endorsement, or a judgement about how they operate. The full list of what we do and do not check is here.
- Not comprehensive. Our directory is US-focused and covers certificate holders with helicopters. We would rather have a smaller accurate list than a complete unreliable one.
Why the site is deliberately small
We hold records on several hundred certificate holders and could trivially generate a page for each. We have not, because the underlying source gives us five columns per company, and five columns do not make three hundred pages worth reading — they make three hundred pages that differ by a name. Every page here has to hold facts no other page holds. That rule means the site grows slowly and by hand, which is the correct trade.
The same applies to the pages we have not built. City pages will exist when real operators are based in that city and we have something specific to say about flying there — not because the city name looks like a search term.
Corrections and delisting
If something here is wrong, tell us — we will correct it and note when. If you operate one of the listed companies and would rather not appear at all, say so and we will remove you without argument.