The helicopter request form

Flight and aircraft

• Aircraft being flown — search by N-number. The briefing type follows the aircraft you pick.
• Purpose & mission — one list: personal, training, EMS / medevac, pipeline or powerline patrol, offshore, law enforcement / SAR, utility, sightseeing and more. It fills in defaults below: Offshore marks the arrival as an offshore site, EMS marks a scene landing zone, Patrol picks a low-level route profile. You can change any of them.
• Flight rules planned — VFR or IFR.
• Instructor or safety pilot onboard — a name, or leave it blank.
• Have flotation gear — answer honestly. On long over-water legs it drives the float warning.
• Pilot currency (from logbook) — read-only chips for IFR approaches and day/night landings. Red means not current.

Rotorcraft operation

• Operation Profile — how the flight is flown:
  • Airport-to-Airport — a normal trip; weather, airspace and obstacles are checked along the route.
  • Local — you leave and return to the same place.
  • Low-level route — a corridor along the route; asks for corridor width.
  • Area work — an operating area; asks for a centre and radius.
• Planned operating altitude AGL — picked from a list, 100 ft to 4,500 ft. Below 3,000 ft AGL it also sets your cruise altitude.
• Low-level operation — adds a search for cables, wires, towers, cranes, drones and similar low-altitude hazards. Coverage depends on what the notice source publishes.

Route and schedule

Altitude, fuel and occupants

• Planned cruise altitude — bands below 3,000 ft and 3,000–4,999 ft are measured AGL; higher bands are MSL.
• Fuel — add usable capacity and cruise burn on the aircraft card once, and fuel is planned in gallons. Otherwise pick fuel endurance in hours.
• Total souls onboard — 1 to 24.