Jerry Mullins has been leading Enstrom Helicopter as president and CEO since early 2004. Rotor & Wing visited with him on the eve of Heli-Expo 2008 to discuss the Menominee, Mich.-based airframe manufacturer’s view of the market today and the opportunities and challenges ahead.

What opportunities does today's market present for Enstrom?  

We’ve had a dedicated police demonstrator, the 480B Guardian, flying all over the United States for the last two years. Just before the show, we demo’d the 480B in Fayetteville, N.C. and throughout North and South Carolina and in Florida. We’ve delivered two police-configured ships to Mexico in the last couple of months.

The reason we see the police market as an opportunity is that Bell has quit manufacturing the 206B. That was our prime competitor. Some of the police markets that were using the 206B are now going to be looking at Enstrom, Schweizer, Eurocopter. The fact that we’ve got the same engine and nearly the same performance as the 206B, I think, is going to open up some doors for us. We’ve got some proven time here in the United States. Out in Pasadena, Calif. we have a 480B that’s been operating for over a year very successfully. Also, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has been operating a 480B.

We’re also with the 480B working the military training market. We’ve been pursuing heavily military training. These countries are getting a bunch of military aircraft. They need pilots. Thailand and South Korea are just a couple that we’ve been working on for years. Those things take time. We’re hoping to really make a dent in the military training market. That seems to be our niche, also, as well as the police market.

The other part is individual aircraft sales, VIP. It’s an economical aircraft to own and operate and the fact the 206 is not out there gives us an opportunity to penetrate that market.

What is the company doing to take advantage of those opportunities?  

What we’re doing is not only expanding our dealerships but actually evaluating and replacing some of our existing dealers.

Currently, we have 23 dealers throughout the world and 12 representatives throughout the world. So basically 35 reps throughout the world and we’re looking at 12 others that are under review right now. To get to 47 is our target.

That’s our clear way of selling, being a small company. Getting a good, quality dealer in the country is the key. The guy that has the contacts, that’s the key to our success. We can’t market all these countries.

What's the biggest challenge you face as a manufacturer and how are you addressing it?  

Ever since I’ve been here, the thing I hear over and over again, we put a pilot in a 480B and they’re just blown away. They love it because of tail-rotor effectiveness and the smoothness of the ride and all the other features. Typically, the response we get when we approach them the first time is, “Well, I’ve never really been in an Enstrom.”

So our biggest challenge is to get pilots in our aircraft. Once we get to that point, the sale is made as far as the pilot goes, with the performance of the aircraft. But we’re not a big Bell, where we can go out and spend millions of dollars in marketing, advertising, demonstrators, etc., etc. That makes it difficult. How can I get exposure without a lot of money to get exposure?

So what we’re trying to do—and we’ve got some dealers that are helping us—is doing a co-op advertising program where we pay part of it and the dealer pays part of it, depending on the country, and even doing that in the United States, so we can share marketing costs.

How did Enstrom do in 2007, and what are your plans for the coming year?  

Because sales didn’t happen early in the year in 2007, it was slow. We slowed down early in the year, and we weren’t able to recover. We got sales to 27, and our projection had been 26. But our deliveries were down to 17.

Our forecast is to produce 28 helicopters this year—20 turbines and eight pistons. We already got six under a contract with the Peruvian navy for F28F trainers, so pistons are pretty well eaten up for the year. A couple of other individual sales will take the other two.

Of the 117 turbines we’ve delivered, we’ve got 25 of them in the police market. We really feel like that’s going to be a good market once we get the exposure there.  We have some significant multi-ship sales being worked in 2008, which could have a tremendous impact on the company.

What is Enstrom highlighting at Heli-Expo?

At the show, we’re going to be delivering a 480B to Plaquemines Parish, a police department out of Louisiana. It’s a small community on the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi.

It’s got the new Chelton Flight Systems electronic flight instrumentation (EFIS) cockpit in it. It’s the first one we’ve delivered with a new EFIS cockpit.

We also have the Chelton EFIS in our law enforcement demonstrator, which will also be at the show. It’s a great system. Everybody that looks at it loves it. It just makes the workload so much easier.

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Expanding in North America
Booth 1531

Thales is busy expanding in North American markets, civilly through its involvement in Sikorsky Aircraft’s S-76D program and Eurocopter’s growing customer base with its MEGHAS avionics. (The French avionics manufacturer also is a key player in the U.S. Marine Corps’ Bell Helicopter H-1 upgrade program and the U.S. Army UH-72A Lakota, based on Eurocopter’s EC145.) The S-76D is using Thales’ TopDeck avionics suite, which will be demonstrated at its stand. TopDeck is Thales’ most advanced helicopter avionics suite, and includes a full, interactive glass cockpit with large, LCD displays, interactive flight management and radio communications, cursor control devices, and an automatic flight control system. The company also will be explaining the evolution of its global services and support for helicopters.

The Newest Schweizer
Booth 2040

Schweizer Aircraft will be showing off its new turbine aircraft, the Model 434, for which it is offering delivery positions during the show. It also will update attendees on its plans for certification of the four-bladed, turbine-powered aircraft. Schweizer has its development plate full, being the center of parent Sikorsky Aircraft’s program to field and fly the X2 technology demonstrator (also on display at the show), not to mention its fixed-wing surveillance aircraft efforts. Schweizer launched the 434 program late last year with an order for the aircraft from Saudi Arabia’s interior ministry, which will use the 434s as trainers. It will draw on the four-bladed rotor and dynamics developed for the Northrop Grumman MQ-8B Fire Scout unmanned aerial vehicle being built for the U.S. Navy and Army, which is based on the 333.

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Return On Safety Investment
Wednesday, Feb. 27, 8 am-12 pm

In their efforts to boost the safety of helicopter operations, leaders of the International Helicopter Safety Team are coming to Houston to brief operators on the progress of their efforts to reduce the helicopter accident rate 80 by 2016. They also are soliciting interest in and support for those efforts from more operators.

A key part of their effort at the show is this Wednesday session, in which team leaders will take on the argument, rarely aired publicly, that safety gains costs too much money (and that helicopter accidents are a cost of doing business).

Launched in late 2005, the international team has received backing from major airframe and engine makers, regulators from around the world, and big helicopter operators (particularly from the offshore-support sector). But it is looking for more support from and involvement of smaller operators, which make up the bulk of the industry.

Safety Management Systems
Wednesday, Feb. 27, 1-3 pm

Another key element of the International Helicopter Safety Team’s efforts at Heli-Expo is this session, which seeks to explain the value of a safety management system and the team’s drive to make such systems easier for all operators to use.

In the last five months, the International Helicopter Safety Team has taken on the challenge of figuring out how to implement the most promising means of reducing or eliminating accidents. That implementation effort follows nearly two years of analytical work to identify the most common contributors to helicopter accidents and prioritize how to attack them.

The foundation of accident-mitigation measures, team members agreed, would be an effective safety management system. So they developed an online “tool kit” to make it easier for individual outfits to craft and adopt a safety management system that works for their operations.

Team members will brief attendees on that tool kit and the value safety management systems can bring to their operations during this session.

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Good Food Fast
A highly acclaimed, Houston-based restaurant chain that features unique, baja-style cuisine, there is much more to Berryhill Baja Grill’s tantalizing, south-of-the-border menu than your standard tex-mex tacos and tamales.

Long before the Astrodome or NASA came to town, Walter Berryhill was making tamales; he started in 1928, selling his homemade fare from a pushcart in Houston’s River Oaks neighborhood. He retired in the 1960s, but his recipes were resurrected nearly 30 years later.

Berryhill Baja Grill has 11 Houston-area locations. In addition serving good food fast, they showcase the work of Houston artist Ken Robertson, whose murals include originals of Elvis and Mona Lisa.

A Texas Country Icon, Plus Pies
Royer’s Round Top Café (979-249-3611) only seats 38, and the place is popular. But it’s worth the trip and the wait.

The Royers are the third family to own and run the café in Round Top, Texas (population 77) , about an hour west of Houston on the road to Austin. They serve “contemporary comfort food,” from a Grilled Shrimp BLT on Jalapeno Sourdough Bread to Grilled Pork Tenderloin with a Peach N’ Pepper Glaze to The Great Steak, a 10-oz., center-cut filet “that you cut with a fork and runs rings around Ruth Chris’s, Sullivan’s and Bob’s Chop House in Dallas,” the Royers say. The café also has a wine list of more than 60 wines.

Best of all, though, all are Royer’s world-famous homemade pies,  all of which are served with a dollop of vanilla ice cream. (The pie costs 50 cents more without the ice cream). If you can’t make it to Round Top, order a pie on line.

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