•   Overview  |
•   PHT Mission  |
•   Your Four Keys to Success  |
•   Our Helicopter  |
•   Our Team  |
•   Our Location  |
•   Training Area

Welcome to the machine.

Flying the PHT helicopter
We have the best training helicopter available in the Bell 47 G4 because it’s big, it’s powerful, and it offers a more realistic flying experience than the lighter, cheaper, and more fragile “toy” helicopters other schools use. The Bell 47 G4 you train on at PHT is very similar to the industry standard Bell 206 helicopter — and we believe that this similarity will help ready you for the real-world conditions you’ll face as a working pilot.

Why we chose the Bell 47 G4
After much careful consideration and comparison, our experience led us to choose the Bell 47 G4 helicopter, the largest and most powerful of piston-engine training machines. Its speed, size and power make it the perfect training machine as its capabilities create a training environment relative to that of a real working commercial situation. In fact, the Bell 47 G4 is statistically the closest machine you can get to a turbine-engine Bell 206 helicopter, which is the standard for the industry. Other typical training helicopters are not capable of operating at the same level of power at a gross weight, and their limitations can negatively impact your ability to learn.

Many schools use smaller, lighter, and less powerful machines, like the Robinson R22 for example, which in our opinion doesn't allow for the mistakes a student pilot is certain to make. The Bell 47 G4, however, can handle the rigors placed on it by a student pilot. At first, student pilots can be a bit clumsy and need to learn how to land a helicopter gently. With a sturdy machine, we can let the students try until they get it right, and it's okay if they bang the machine up a little, because we know it isn't going to break. When flying a more fragile helicopter, the instructor would have to take the controls away from the student in order to preserve the very expensive machine.

At PHT, we're not about taking the controls away from you — we're about teaching you to use them. In choosing the Bell 47 G4 for our training helicopter, we considered the skills you would be learning. For instance, you will have to learn an emergency procedure called a "full-on auto-rotation" — which is essentially an engine-off landing. In the Bell 47 G4, we can safely practice this because its big, heavy rotor system gives us inertia, and thus creates a much more forgiving situation.

In less powerful helicopters, this procedure can be difficult to complete, because just before you are about to land the maneuver, you will have to turn the engine back on in order to give the helicopter the power it needs to keep it from landing too hard. This is not the most accurate simulation of real-word training conditions. If you were flying a helicopter alone and the engine died, wouldn't you want to know how to land it properly? After all, when you're landing, it's that last six inches that matter the most. You need to learn to ground the helicopter without hurting your passengers or yourself. This is just one example of a vital lesson you wouldn't learn if you trained on other machines — and it's a lesson we require every student to learn before they're allowed to fly solo.

The Bell 47 G4 also has the ability to use and make the most of challenging terrain and diverse weather conditions — which you will definitely encounter while training at PHT. Because of our proximity to the BC coastal mountain range, we need a training helicopter that can take full advantage of such an extreme and awe-inspiring flying experience. In a less powerful helicopter, we would not be able to maximize the height restriction and could only accomplish half of what we're able to in the Bell 47 G4. Ironically, other schools in the region claim the coastal mountains as a feature of their training area, but they don't have training machines capable of flying it!

We want you to have the best training experience possible, and we have found that we can give you that and still offer you great value by choosing a helicopter that maintains a high standard of performance.

Bell 47 G4 Statistics
In a commercial environment, you will be required to take heavy loads into confined areas, so it’s important that you fly in a training machine that has a similar feel to that real-life experience. We believe in preparing you properly for the working conditions of the industry, because the job site is not the place to learn what is required of a commercial pilot. Here we show a comparison of common training machines and stats that show how superior the Bell 47 G4 is to the competition.

The Bell 47 G4 has a useful load greater than the empty weight of the Switzer 300 CBI and it has the ability to lift an R22. Our Bell 47 G4 beats the Robinson R44 in every category, and rivals that of the Bell 206 Jet Ranger. A look at the dollar-per-hour rate shows the Bell 47 G4 is the best value in the helicopter training industry today.