We are a family business specialising in Rotorway Helicopter sales and support. We also provide spares, support and second-hand sales and offer help in building, maintaining and supporting Rotorways in the UK.
We are easy to reach. We located about 45 minutes from London and half-an-hour from Cambridge, just off the M11 motorway at Junction 8. There’s a map on our Contact Us page
( Our registered company name is Southern Helicopters Ltd )
A claim to fame was helping Mark Evans built a Rotorway Exec 162F for the TV series “A Chopper Is Born”.
The brothers get CAA approval for the Helipac luggage carrying system. An electronic blade balancing system is installed at Southern Helicopters.
Mark Evans makes documentary “A Chopper is Born” with help from Southern Helicopters.
Although building a Rotorway can be great fun and a rewarding pass time it must be said that it is not a laugh a minute. But that is what it was when David and myself got involved with TV presenter Mark Evans when making the television series A Chopper is Born.
Our first visit by the crew saw them covering every window and glass door in our hangar, it was to remain like this for 6 months and was a dark and depressing place to work on bright sunny days between filming. For the TV series Mark had to arrive on a different mode of transport so it was our job to find 13 types. This varied from a bike, ride on mower and JCB right through to a combine harvester. Filming for this for each episode took up to an hour and ended up with around 20 seconds of time on the finished product. The first episode found Mark opening up the boxes and, just like a child at Christmas, throwing millions of polystyrene granules all over the place after we had painstakingly packed the parts just like they would have arrived from Rotorway. This looked good on film and showed his enthusiastic and humorous nature which made the film so popular but trying to clear up the mess and sort out all the parts the next day took us ages and Mark’s parentage was discussed many times.
As with all of these programmes, time is not available to let the presenter build the entire project and we helped with some parts. But Mark was not only a first class presenter but had a good engineering background and did his research on every step of the build so he knew what he was talking about. At the end of some film days an extra ‘out take ‘film was shot and these had us in fits of laughter. One showed Mark trying to extract a small part of the kit from the mouth of the director lying prone on the operating table after allegedly swallowing this essential part, not very funny in print perhaps but hilarious on film as Mark, complete with fiberglass tail cone on his head struggles to retrieve his lost part. Sadly some of these extras were not included on the DVD of the series but are shown on the Discovery channel programme.
We are David & Jonathan Bull, the owners of Southern Helicopters in the UK, and we’d like to share with you our enthusiasm for flying helicopters. We enable you to build and fly your own helicopter, the Rotorway A600 Talon.
