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Mike Becker, co-founder, chief pilot, and chief flying instructor of Becker Helicopters

Hard Yakka

By Marcus Hocking

Published on: August 19, 2016
Estimated reading time 17 minutes, 59 seconds.

Through hard work and vision, Australian operator Becker Helicopters has built a hugely successful business offering initial rotary-wing training to military and government clients from around the world.

Based on the doorstep of Australia’s stunning Sunshine Coast, the success story that is Becker Helicopters is a prime example of what can be achieved through vision and “hard yakka” — an Australian term for hard work. Specializing in contracted military helicopter pilot training, Becker Helicopters has built up its niche business over more than two decades. The quality of its offering today is perhaps best displayed by the fact it is trusted by militaries around the globe to train their pilots.

Mike Becker, co-founder, chief pilot, and chief flying instructor of Becker Helicopters
Mike Becker, co-founder, chief pilot, and chief flying instructor of Becker Helicopters, stands alongside the flight line at his facility near Brisbane, Australia. Paul Sadler Photo

Husband and wife duo Mike and Jan Becker co-founded the company in 1996, and over the years have developed a scalable training model that can take on a large number of students, using any platform required, for a client wanting to outsource its accelerated initial entry rotary-wing (IERW) pilot training.

“We are finding that outsourcing is the model for military organizations around the world now, as most have been told to cut budgets to save money,” Mike Becker told Vertical during a recent visit to the company’s facility a little over an hour north of the Queensland capital, Brisbane. “Instead of wasting millions of dollars on creating their own infrastructure, purchasing helicopters, and supplying instructor pilots dedicated only to training, they can out-source and send their ab initio pilots to us. The training is done with a firm fixed price in 10 months. They then go back to their conversion units and convert on to type.”

Today, with Mike serving as chief pilot and chief flying instructor, and Jan as CEO (she is also a commercial helicopter pilot and a board member of Helicopter Association International), Becker Helicopters flies around 230 sorties a week with a fleet of 17 aircraft (15 Bell 206B-3 JetRangers, an Airbus Helicopters AS350D, and a Bell 47G), and delivers over 15,000 flight hours of training each year.

Becker Helicopters' fleet
The company has a fleet of 17 aircraft, including 15 customized Bell 206B-3 JetRangers. Across the fleet, the aircraft complete over 15,000 flight hours of training each year. Paul Sadler Photo

But Becker Helicopters is no overnight success. The Beckers established the helicopter flight training school 20 years ago after returning to Australia from Papua New Guinea, where they had been performing helicopter utility work in the country’s challenging mountainous environments. The company began with a small fleet of Bell 47s, Hughes TH-55s and Robinson R22s.

The early years were quite tough, but the pair soon realized this was the norm for any new aviation business. However, things were about to change thanks to a bold new strategy. Taking off their “small helicopter school” hat and thinking bigger picture, the Beckers formulated a business plan that focused on gaining corporate and allied military and government clients — with the aim of providing more advanced training and growing the company’s student numbers. This “can do” Aussie attitude would secure them a contract with a country in the Middle East in 2008.

“It took a lot of mud to stick on a lot of walls before we had one organization take a chance on us,” said Mike Becker. “It’s easy to say you can do something, but it’s a different thing to actually go out and deliver the product. But we were committed 100 percent with all the money we made always going back into the company, back into our machinery, and back into our people. That actually paid dividends because we were able to perform for the client.”

 students begin their time at Becker learning English before they can get airborne.
Since the company signed its first contract with a foreign customer in 2008, students have arrived at Becker from around the world. Some ab initio students begin their time at Becker learning English before they can get airborne. Paul Sadler Photo

Training foreign students to become military aviators has its challenges. In some instances, ab initio students can spend up to a year at Becker Helicopters learning English before they even get airborne. Then, once competent in English, students will climb into a JetRanger’s right-hand seat and be taught the basics of helicopter flight. Progressing through navigation and a full instrument flight rules (IFR) course, along with a night unaided phase, the students are fully trained as IFR and night visual flight rules (VFR) pilots before they start their training with night vision goggles (NVGs). Prior to graduation, the students will also do some sessions of basic formation flying, as well as advanced maneuvering and handling techniques in the JetRanger.

Students on Becker Helicopters’ accelerated initial entry rotary-wing training course
Students on Becker Helicopters’ accelerated initial entry rotary-wing training course are fully trained as instrument flight rules and night visual flight rules pilots before they start their training with night vision goggles. Paul Sadler Photo

“We are imparting knowledge, skills and behaviors in accordance with each client’s requirements,” said Mike Becker. “All of our students are a long way from home, they’re in a foreign country communicating in a foreign language and learning to fly helicopters — it’s a massive ask in anyone’s language.”

Under one roof

From maintenance to manuals, Becker Helicopters keeps every function it can control in-house. The Beckers have written all of their own internal documentation, manuals, checklists and exam preparation collateral. “Anything that was a cost center and that we couldn’t control, we decided to turn into a profit center and be a part of our business model,” said Mike. “Maintenance, we do; documentation, we do; intellectual property development, we do; the standardization of instructors, we do. It was very important for us to manage everything 100 percent in-house.”

To meet client requirements, and to keeps costs at manageable levels, Becker Helicopters has created its own training platform using the JetRanger. “When you are training to a military standard and to meet consistent quality in our training, it is very important that we not only standardize our instructors, but we standardize our platform,” said Mike. “If you don’t standardize your platform, then you can’t standardize your training materials, your checklists or your processes — and therefore you can’t standardize your output product.”

Becker Helicopters invests hundreds of thousands of dollars in every second-hand JetRanger brought into the fleet, keeping the company’s team of engineers busy remanufacturing them and bringing them up to the company’s exacting standards. “We’ve sourced JetRangers from quite a number of operators and have striped them right back, rewired, repainted, and fully refurbished them to a near-new factory condition and are all standardized,” said Mike. “At the same time, we are configuring them with the avionics and equipment that we require, and are making every helicopter in our fleet 100 percent identical.”

So identical, in fact, that every helicopter has a different colored band painted around its fuselage and engine cowling for easier identification. Each NVG-certified JetRanger is fitted with Aspen Evolution 2000H multi-function and primary flight displays, interfacing with a two-axis Genesys HeliSAS, a Garmin 430W GPS/Nav/Comm, a Trig TT31 ADS-B transponder, and a Freeflight RA-4500 radar altimeter.

“This is a major investment for the company,” said Mike. “If we are putting ourselves up to deliver a product that no one else can deliver then we have got to do things that no one else has done or is doing. We need to treat ourselves as a military unit and a military unit would not accept aircraft all configured differently trying to do the same job.”

However, quality student output comes from quality instruction. Captain Scott Summers, a former Australian Army special operations Black Hawk pilot, leads Becker Helicopters’ team of instructors and overall school operations. While not all Becker Helicopters’ instructors are ex-military, they all undergo an extensive standardization process, regardless of their experience and the number of hours in their logbook, to ensure students receive a similar level of training.

“We find some of the ex-military instructors are excellent because they have the right ethos — they know what the product is that we want to deliver and they have seen that side of it already,” said Mike. “By the same token, we have trained many civil pilots up over the last 20 years and they have turned into fantastic instructors now able to deliver a military standard aviator.”

The instructors learn how to teach the Beckers’ way and will spend 10 hours in the JetRanger where they learn the practical teaching style to impart what needs to be delivered. They will also be trained up to deliver night VFR and instrument rating instruction — if they don’t already have those qualifications. “We have a massive internal training burden just to be able to meet our commitments,” said Mike. “But again, that’s part of our success, too. We’re not shy on doing that for the right people.”

Bell 206B-3 JetRangers
Becker has four “home grown” Level C JetRanger fixed-base simulators. They are designed to replicate the unique customization of the operator’s Bell 206B-3 JetRangers. Paul Sadler Photo

Given the cultural differences and language barriers that can exist between students and instructors, it is very important for the Beckers to find the right match in terms of personality. “You’re going to have instructors and students that occasionally don’t work well together,” said Mike. “We have to move on that very quickly.”

In a Sim

Becker Helicopters attained Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) certification for the first of its “home grown,” Level C JetRanger flight simulators in April 2015. Through its affiliate company, Off-Planet Simulation, Becker Helicopters now has four fixed-base simulators approved for a range of qualifications including a private pilot license, commercial pilot license instrument training, IFR training and renewals, night VFR training, airline transport pilot license multi-crew cooperation, and instructor training.

Features include a realistic, full-sized JetRanger cockpit fitted with avionics displays, gauges, and switches, plus a genuine cyclic, a collective and anti-torque peddles representative of Becker’s 206B-3 JetRangers. A continuous visual display provides a 210-degree lateral and 68-degree vertical field of view, projected in high definition onto a curved screen in front of the fuselage. Students can conduct hovering and visual operations, as well as in-flight emergency training, including full engine-off touchdown autorotations.

“Simulation is really important to us, and it is important in the training cycle that the simulator replicates as much as possible the actual helicopter being used,” said Mike. “Because we modify all our own helicopters, we needed our simulators to mirror them 100 percent. We can now run through all the core training materials in the simulator because it has such high fidelity. This makes our training much more efficient and productive.”

Simulating aided night flight using NVGs has been Becker Helicopters’ latest achievement. Using a 3D printer, its dedicated simulation engineers have handmade their own night vision devices that clip onto a student’s flight helmet, just like a real set. With the screen blackened out and helmets connected with head tracking software, students can look though the goggles and see the visuals while still being able to use the cockpit instrumentation. “It also allows us to simulate NVG emergencies such as black spots and single tube failures,” said Mike. “It certainly adds to the simulator’s overall fidelity and capability.”

Valued at around US$1.5 million each, the self-contained JetRanger simulators are now awaiting final regulatory approval for night VFR instructor training and visual circling approach training. “With our next simulator, we are going to install full motion,” said Mike. “This will sell for around US$2 million. Although we’re just a bit busy at the moment, but we plan to take them to market within the next 12 months.”

No place like home

Walking along the flight line while a quadrant of JetRangers start up for another training sortie, Mike talks of the future and plans to build Becker Helicopters into a US$150-million business over the next five years. While it still does some utility work on the side, Becker Helicopters’ main focus is training with large groups for big clients, and they are firmly focused on expanding their training programs.

Mike and Jan Becker have big plans for the future
Mike and Jan Becker have big plans for the future, and hope to turn Becker Helicopters into a US$150-million business within the next five years. Paul Sadler Photo

“We have a LLC company base in America and we’ll have some mobile training teams that can go into a foreign country to do some top-up training,” said Mike. “The goal is to have the primary basic training always here in Australia because that is our core training base. We need to expand on our current model and form partnerships with OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] because we can deliver the IERW and transition training in their products. We are not stuck on a platform. We have got a very unique model that has been built over 20 years and it has great potential globally.”

With the U.S. to Australian dollar conversion rate making it around 30 percent cheaper to train ‘”Down Under,” Mike boasts Australia is the best environment in the world to train pilots. “We don’t have the airspace issues that they have overseas because our population base is so small,” he said. “We have guaranteed sunshine here and excellent expertise in-country. This is a great benefit to our current and future clients.”

Going forward, the company will be offering students an opportunity to take even more away from their experience with Becker Helicopters by offering a Bachelor’s degree course for military organizations. “They can come to us, do their training and go through a Bachelor program before going home very proud having achieved their aviator wings,” said Mike.

Not all of Becker’s instructors are ex-military
Not all of Becker’s instructors are ex-military, but to ensure a similar level of training, they undergo a standardization process after they join the company. Paul Sadler Photo

Any Heli-Expo delegates who have attended one of the training seminars Mike has delivered at the exposition over the years will certainly be familiar with the name Becker Helicopters. “We talk about touchdown autorotations and get some good dialogue going,” he said. “Next year we are looking to do a tour around the U.S. with an OEM and we are looking for people to register their interest on our website for us to come and spend a week with them delivering the training that I speak about at Heli-Expo.”

From a small helicopter school to an internationally-recognized IERW training provider with a fleet of 17 helicopters and almost 100 staff, Becker Helicopters has won several highly esteemed accolades for their business locally. Stalwarts of the Australian helicopter industry, without a doubt Mike and Jan Becker run the busiest civil helicopter operation in Australia — and there’s plenty more hard yakka ahead for these quiet achievers.

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