About

Built to solve a problem we know first hand

HeliSafe Surveyor was founded because landing site records were being kept in spreadsheets, shared drives and PDFs that nobody could be certain were current. The people who needed the answer were crews, and the answer needed to be one place.

The problem HeliSafe Surveyor is solving

A landing site is only as good as the last time somebody looked at it properly. Between surveys, sites change: a crane goes up, a surface degrades, a tree grows into an approach. The record has to keep up, and it has to be the same record everyone is working from.

In practice, that record was usually scattered. A survey in one place, a plate drawn separately, an approval in an email, a closure passed on by word of mouth. Each part defensible on its own, but no single answer to the question an auditor actually asks: what did you know, and when did you know it?

HeliSafe Surveyor exists to make that one question answerable. The survey, the plate, the approval and the current status of every site are held together, so the answer is retrievable rather than reconstructed.

The company

Founded by: James John and Pamela John
Registered: HeliSafe Surveyor Ltd, company number 17031918, registered in England and Wales
Based: Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
Certified: Cyber Essentials

Who built it

James John

Founder and Director

Army avionics engineer turned Apache pilot, followed by a commercial career spanning police air support, charter and frontline HEMS, including roles at the National Police Air Service, Volare Aviation, Specialist Aviation Services, GAMA Aviation and Essex & Herts Air Ambulance.

A former UK CAA Post Holder, and currently a Type Rating Instructor and Deputy Training Manager at Essex & Herts Air Ambulance, responsible for training the crews who depend on accurate landing site surveys every shift.

Twenty-four years in aviation, all of it operational. That is the experience behind HeliSafe Surveyor: not a software company trying to solve an aviation problem, but an aviator who got tired of watching it done badly and built something better.

Pam John

Co-founder and Director

A CIM-qualified marketer with over fifteen years building brands and turning data into decisions, across start-ups, scale-ups and major corporates.

Most recently Consumer Insight Manager at McLaren Automotive, and before that part of the Forseven team from the ground up.

Pam has spent her career at the intersection of strategy, insight and creative thinking, with a track record of making complex information mean something to real people. At HeliSafe Surveyor she brings that to an industry overdue a clearer approach, making sure the platform is not only operationally sound but genuinely built for the people using it.

Who it is for

HeliSafe Surveyor is used by UK air ambulance charities and specialist helicopter operators, from single-base HEMS charities to multi-base operations working across more than one national regulatory framework.

Who we work with

We work alongside specialists, complementing each other, to create the best product we can for our customers.

Platform

Quantavia — HeliCrewManager

Quantavia build HeliCrewManager, the crew and operations platform used by helicopter operators for rostering, flight time limitations, currency and qualification tracking. It was founded by a former air ambulance pilot, and it shows in the detail.

We work together in both directions, and work is underway to connect the two platforms so a landing site surveyed in HeliSafe reaches an operator’s HeliCrewManager directory without being entered twice.

Crew and operations · Flight time limitations · Currency and qualifications

helicrewmanager.com

Industry knowledge

Pilots Who Ask Why

Pilots Who Ask Why is written by two working offshore pilots who take the material most of us skip and make it readable. Accident reports running to hundreds of pages condensed into what actually changed the outcome. Performance classes explained properly rather than recited.

They cover the ground our own customers work in, and we recommend them to crews.

Accident analysis · Performance and regulation · Human factors

pilotswhoaskwhy.com

How we build it

Safety critical by default

Wrong is worse than absent

Where the platform cannot verify a figure against its source, it declines to produce a result rather than offering a plausible one. That is a deliberate choice, and it is what makes the answers you do get dependable.

Traceable to source

Every number comes from somewhere

Performance figures trace to the flight manual table they came from, and survey data carries its own revision history. Nothing in the platform is a value somebody typed in once and nobody can account for.

Small and accountable

You will speak to the people who build it

HeliSafe Surveyor is a small company, so support is not a ticket queue. It is a personal service from people who know the product in depth. Being small also means we have continuity arrangements in place, set out on our security page.

See it against one of your own sites

A twenty minute call, using a landing site you already operate to.

Book a demo