Helicopter Flight Training

Overview

Nelson Aviation College's helicopter training team offer fully flexible training programmes to suit individual clients needs and dreams! Whether as a hobby or a career, NAC can offer professional yet friendly and relaxed training in one of the best aviation climates in the country. Excellent weather and diverse terrain (low flying area and mountain flying less than 5 minutes away), provide a realistic and challenging training ground.

To maximise your investment, you should utilise every minute in the aircraft and train where traffic density is light enough to allow uninterrupted training, but heavy enough to be realistic. Our training achieves this by operating from Motueka aerodrome (uncontrolled), which is only minutes away from Nelson Airport (Controlled) where traffic density is often heavy.

NAC has seven helicopters in its fleet; a Hughes 500C and six Robinson 22s. Our helicopters are all hangared onsite. Also available for training, by arrangement, are the Robinson 44 and Hughes 300. Please note that a weight restriction of 109 Kg applies for training in a Robinson 22.

Nelson Aviation College has a maximum flight training instructor to student ratio of 1:4. This ensures quality traning for every student. Our Instructors are professional and have commercial experience. As part of your training you will be exposed to a commercial operation. We also offer water bucket training and trolley landings in our Hughes 500C. These skills can be documented in your CV and logbook, making you stand out from other commercial pilots.

Courses

To view flight training details for each of our courses, please choose the item of interest to you from the menu on the left. Courses can also be tailored to suit your own personal requirements, so please don't hesitate to contact us for more information.

All our training programs are safety oriented and focus on the following:

Basic and advanced handling skills
Emergency manoeuvres
Navigation techniques
Sling loading
Mountain flying
Night flying
Crew co-ordination and management
Low level and reduced visibility operation
In-flight decision making