Aircraft Manufacturing, Marketing and Sales

Horizon Helicopters has adopted the McLaren Cars Ltd method of manufacturing and selling its products worldwide. Manufacturing-wise, this is to subcontract manufacture of all the major parts of the aircraft to specialist manufacturing companies, leaving itself to concentrate on system design, aircraft assembly, flight test, and all control software.

Marketing-wise, Horizon will do the majority of the work itself and whenever it appears more effective use contractors for support.

Sales-wise, in the Personal Transport sector Horizon will use the McLaren Cars / automobile route of creating local distributors. In fact, many of those are likely to be selling Autocopters alongside high-value cars such as $200K to $1.2M Ferraris, Bentleys, Porsches, McLarens etc. In the beginning, as a Personal Transport (PT) aircraft, the Autocopter was priced to compete for the same dollar as a high value super car. Often on such things, the buyer’s ‘ego’ will be factored somewhere into the buy decision.

Air taxis may follow more of the Uber route to market where footfall is not nearly so important as in PT and sales are split between individual owners and large corporations.

Horizon has not so far considered the rental market, aka Hertz, Avis, etc.