Kit Helicopter Price UK: What It Really Costs

An argument, not a sales page. Tell us where it is wrong.

How much is a kit helicopter?

Less than a certified helicopter to buy — and the purchase price is the smallest number in the decision. Argo Aero UK, the UK dealer for Manufaktura Lotnicza, sells factory-built aircraft rather than kits, and this is the arithmetic as we read it. In the United Kingdom most of what a kit helicopter costs you is not money. The law requires you to build 51 per cent of the aircraft with your own hands, which is months of your life. The finished machine may carry two seats and fly by day only. The CAA inspects it rather than the LAA. You may not use it for paid instruction. And if yours is the first of its type in Britain, the authority investigates the design, the construction and the handling characteristics before anybody flies it.

None of that is an argument against building one. People who have done it rarely regret it, and the knowledge they end up with is worth something real. It is an argument against comparing a kit price with a finished aircraft price as though the two numbers measure the same thing. They do not.

Argo Aero UK is an aircraft dealer, so read this as an interested party setting out the arithmetic. Everything legal below comes from the CAA's own documents and is named so that you can check it.

What the UK actually allows

Two documents govern it, and both are the CAA's own: CAP 659, “Amateur Built Aircraft”, Issue 2, November 2005, and CAP 733, “Permit to Fly Aircraft”, 28 June 2004. CAP 659 is explicit that it deals with the amateur building of aeroplanes, microlights, gyroplanes and helicopters — a helicopter is not an exception to the route, it is inside it.

Two seats, day VFR. CAP 659 sets the criteria at not more than four seats for aeroplanes and not more than two, including the pilot, for helicopters and gyroplanes, day VFR only. CAP 733 puts it the other way round: Permits to Fly will not be issued for amateur-built helicopters with more than two seats.

The 51 per cent rule, and the exception that matters. You may not commission someone else to build the aircraft, or significant parts of it — with the exception, in CAP 659's own list, of the engines, propellers, and helicopter or gyroplane transmissions, rotor heads and rotor blades. Read that again, because it is the whole drive train of a helicopter. The hardest and most safety-critical assemblies are the ones a manufacturer is allowed to supply finished.

The rule is about whose hands, not about where. Nothing in it says the work must happen in your garage. Doing your share at the manufacturer's factory, with its tooling and its people beside you, is a different proposition from doing it alone in a barn. Whether the CAA accepts that arrangement for a particular aircraft is one of the questions we have put to them, and it is listed below.

The LAA is not approved to inspect one. CAP 733 states that the body now called the LAA is not approved to undertake the inspection of amateur-built helicopters. For gyroplanes the same document describes it being involved in the building, the initial certification and the revalidation. For helicopters the CAA holds that work, and that changes the timescale, the paperwork and who you are dealing with.

First of type is an investigation. Where the helicopter is a first of type, CAP 733 says the CAA reviews its design, construction and handling characteristics. One aircraft proves the route for everybody who follows — and the cost and the months sit on that one aircraft.

The costs that are not on the price list

Your time, counted honestly. Fifty-one per cent of a helicopter is not a weekend project. Price your own hours at whatever you actually earn and put that number beside the kit price; for most people it is the larger of the two.

The first-of-type risk. If the type is already accepted in Britain you are following a path somebody else paid for. If it is not, you are the one paying for the survey, and you are paying before you know the answer.

What you cannot do with it afterwards. No paid instruction, two seats, daylight. If any part of your plan quietly assumed otherwise, it is cheaper to find that out at this paragraph than in year two.

What the register tells you. Look up the amateur-built helicopters actually on the UK register and you find the Rotorway — and those examples date from before BCAR Section VLH existed. A list of aircraft registered decades ago is not evidence that a new type can be approved today. It is the first thing we would want the CAA to confirm, and we have asked.

So can you fly a helicopter safely for less?

Yes — but the cheapest route is almost never the one with the lowest price on it. There are four doors, and it is worth being honest about all of them.

A certified light helicopter. It works, it is well understood, and it is the most expensive door both to open and to keep open.

A kit. The lowest purchase price, with everything above attached to it.

A factory-built very light helicopter. The same weight and seat category as a kit, built by people who do it for a living. The ARGO AH is published from £220,000 and complies with EASA CS-VLR, the certification specification for very light rotorcraft — the standard a newly certified helicopter of this size and weight has to meet. It is not a kit, and the manufacturer is emphatic about that: building at home is prohibited outright, and the owner finishes the aircraft in the factory alongside the people who build them.

Or stop needing to hover. This is the door most people never look at. A gyroplane takes off in a short run, lands slowly and steeply, and cannot stall or spin. It is also the cheapest way we know of to put two people in the air and keep them there — though we sell them, so test that against your own shortlist rather than taking it from us. The ARGON 915 is from £125,000 and the ARGON GTL from £165,000. If the hover is not load-bearing in your plan, this is the door to look at first.

Argo Aero UK sells the last two, so weigh that accordingly. The test we would apply in your place is one question: do you need to hover, or do you need to get somewhere? Most people answer the second and shop for the first.

This page is about what the law allows and what it costs. The full comparison of the two aircraft themselves — speeds, minimum speed, what happens when the engine stops, and what a helicopter genuinely does better — is set out in gyroplane versus helicopter, with the figures taken from the flight manuals.

What we cannot tell you yet

This is the part most pages leave out, and it is the part that decides whether any of the above is still true.

Both CAA documents quoted here were written in 2004 and 2005. They are still the published guidance, and twenty years is a long time. We have written to the CAA to ask whether the route is still open to a new two-seat helicopter type, what the first-of-type investigation involves in practice, whether a builder may do his share of the work on the manufacturer's premises, whether evidence produced for EASA CS-VLR can support a BCAR Section VLH case, and whether the LAA position has changed. When they answer, the answers go here.

Until then, treat every legal statement on this page as the published guidance says it — not as advice about your project. And if you know something we have got wrong, particularly if you have taken an amateur-built helicopter through the UK system yourself, tell us and we will correct it and say who corrected it.

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