… and I’m not talking about flying for fun here ! When one mentions aviaton industry, most people think of airlines first. Ok, this is a large part of the business, but seeing this industry as airlines only is really a minimalistic view. I take apart all private flying activities, and will give you a tour of all the kind of non-airline commercial aviation.

Business aviation

This is quite a know branch of commercial aviation, about which I already posted, including in my post about luxury flying. The number of business jets or turboprops operated daily to move importants persons around is really impressive, and can be a 2-digits percentage of the traffic at some airports.

Freight and postal service

How do you guess DHL, TNT and FedEx can bring the stuff you buy on the other side of the ocean to your door next day ? They operate their own fleet of cargo planes, and they fly round the clock. Lucky crews, with no one complaining about the daily dish…

Many goods are also carried by plane everywhere, and the freight traffic is also a non-negligible part of aviation, depite being less visible.

Flying doctors – search and rescue

This is another category of round the clock traffic. A large number of lives have been saved by aviation. This includes flying doctors to patients, but also flying patients and doctors to hospitals. Aviation also plays a key time-saving role in organ transplants. Helicopters are very frequently involved in such operations.

Search and rescue pilots help all kind of persons, from crashed planes, to victims of all kind of accidents, from road to mountain, or accidents at sea.

Air-police

Police services are also amongst users of aviation, as they fly helicopters or planes on critical missions. Customs and immigration frequently overfly ships at sea, or country borders to fulfill their permanent watch duty.

Serving remote locations

One of the busiest airspace in northern Europe is at low-level over the North Sea. The daily traffic between the coast and the numerous off-shore oil rigs is just huge, and some of this traffic is also medical emergencies.

Last fall, I read a very fun paper in the AOPA magazine about how Christmas Trees are collected by helicopters in the Canadian far north and then dispatched everywhere.

Flying for your fun

Many sport events also rely on aviation. Helicopters used for aerial views are quite an obvious example in this category, but by far not the only one. Typically, during the “Tour de France” cycling race, many planes are flying circles at 25′000ft serving as mobile TV relays.

Finally, if you’re a Google Earth fan, don’t forget that not all of the pictures feeding it are from satellite, many have been taken by specially equipped planes.

A world of its own

So yes, aviation is really a diversified and multi-sided world. Most of it is unknown to most people, and the objective of this blog also to make it more visible. Next time someone’s thinks that aviation is made of airlines, just explain him:

“My doctor did get his last Christmas Tree from an oil rig in the north sea while looking at the Tour de France from and helicopter, and has been arrested by air-police for mail smuggling”. Doh !