Silverstate Helicopters

[micp]

Anyone going to school with Silver State Helicopters? I read today that they have shut down due to financial issues. I was wondering if anyone has had to deal with this. It is pretty sad that alot of guys will lose out on this one. They had been advertising "high paying jobs in aviation". My wife has a coworker who's husband dropped 50k on training and of course cannot get a job. Good thing Silver State had enough money to buy a chopper from Orange County Choppers

[Mudsurfer1234]

the Orange County Choppers bike was the only time i've heard anything about Silverstate.

Did they actually make helicopters? or train people to fly? or work on them?

[Al Lewis]

I just watched a news report where they interviewed a guy here that paid $73,000 up front and was told that they don't give refunds. Seems they never had the staff or the equipment to perform the training they gaurenteed their students. I'm sure it will be investigated and some piece of scum will turn up in another country with all of the money.

[micp]

They did training and then started to do some air taxi, fire service, etc. I have read a little bit about them this evening and it looks like they went from 1 helicopter to 200 in just a few years and had some pretty unhappy customers.

[BarracudaHockey]

They are (were) a nationwide flying school. Via crappy maintance they killed two people here in an R44 and were hung out to dry by the NTSB so I'm sure it was a preemptive move to avoid the multimillion dollar lawsuit.

[ifly3d]

They had a place here in raleigh and shut it down monday morning. They said is was because of the housing fall out. !!!!!!!

[decoy26]

They have declared bankruptcy here in Vegas. Apparently the owner Jerry Aerola has bugged out to Texas.

[BarracudaHockey]

Here's the article about the business being shut down here in jax
http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/l...storyid=101534
The article about the fatal crash
http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/l...?storyid=78707
And the NTSB report that hammered the mechanic and the school
http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief2.asp?...07FA079&akey=1

[BobPhx]

I went to the big recruiting event they had here at Williams Gateway about a year ago. It was sort of a knee-jerk thing, not something I thought a lot about ahead of time. Their application process was set up to feel like a job interview (you had to take a mechanical aptitude test, etc.) so if you were selected (I was, along with about 50 others) you felt special.

~$60K was their going price to get a commercial heli license. Financing was thru some 3rd party. If the school closed you were pretty much screwed, because you still owed the bank your money, and SS had already spent it to buy new R-22's.

I got a bad vibe from the marketing / chief dude that did our "interviews", a real slicky boy (was not Jerry, although he spoke at the recruiting event.) This other guy was ready for us to sign on the dotted line that day. I headed for the door, no way was I giving that guy $60K. However, out of my interview group of abut 8, 2 or 3 were in their early 20's (I'm 40, wife and kids to worry about) and were there with mom and dad, and they signed up on the spot. Yowza. I hope they all made it thru before things went south.

My .02

Bob

[Al Lewis]

According to the news report they did here nobody ever made it through. They said that they didn't have the equipment or the instructors needed to qualify the students.