The hourly rate is the first thing everyone asks about. But two suppliers with an identical hourly rate can send invoices that differ by tens of thousands on the same mission. The difference isn't in the price per hour — it's in how the hours are counted, and how many separate trips get triggered.
For a helicopter, flight time is normally counted from the moment the rotor starts turning before take-off to the moment it stops after landing. That is an established and reasonable definition — the helicopter burns fuel and draws on component life and maintenance intervals even while sitting on the ground with the rotor running.
The definition itself is not the problem. The problem is how the ground time is estimated — and how many separate start-and-stop cycles each booking triggers.
It is common practice to add a fixed number of minutes for every start and every stop — typically around six minutes at each end — regardless of how long start-up and shutdown actually took.
On a mission with a single take-off and a single landing, it's barely noticeable. On a mission with many stops — or many separate bookings to the same area in the same period — it becomes a very different matter.
The point is not that ground time should be free. The point is that the number of cycles should be kept down, and the time that's actually used should be measured, not assumed.
Organisations coordinating transport to many bases nationwide — emergency preparedness, communications infrastructure, power grids — often have several field technicians or departments booking independently of one another. Without coordination, every single request becomes its own trip, with its own start-and-stop cycle. The hourly rate on each booking looks reasonable. The sum of ground time across all the bookings doesn't.
A typical mission on closed national infrastructure:
Up to seven start-and-stop cycles on a single mission.
| Calculation | Time |
|---|---|
| Fixed surcharge — 7 × 6 minutes | 42 minutes |
| Actual rotor time on the ground — measured | approx. 20 minutes |
| Difference | approx. 22 minutes |
The figures above are a worked example based on mission types we know well. Actual start-up time varies with helicopter type, temperature and procedure — which is exactly why it should be measured rather than estimated.
At an hourly rate of NOK 24,000, 22 minutes amounts to roughly NOK 8,800 — on a single mission. Multiply that by the number of uncoordinated individual bookings across an organisation over a year, and the difference adds up fast. Without the hourly rate in any agreement changing by a single krone.
The most effective way to reduce the ground-time cost isn't negotiating the hourly rate harder — it's reducing the number of separate trips. That's exactly what site.flights does: automatic cluster detection finds overlapping bookings in the same area and time window, and combines them into one trip instead of several.
Whoever you choose — ask these in writing, and get the answer in writing:
If you get good answers to all five, you have a supplier you can compare on price. If you don't, the hourly rate in the quote isn't comparable anyway.
Organisations procuring helicopter services to many bases nationwide — emergency preparedness, power grids, communications infrastructure — evaluate almost exclusively on the stated hourly rate in practice. When every department and every field technician books independently, no one sees the sum of ground time across the organisation.
A coordinated booking portal makes it visible and manageable: every booking lands in one place, cluster detection finds the consolidation opportunities automatically, and the administrator has full visibility into what's actually flown — not just what's billed.
Want to work out the potential for your organisation? Book a demo — we'll set up a no-cure-no-pay test.
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