Dan "Pirate" Elliott

Once we got to WA, done a few years there under another Queensland company, really good friends of ours, and then there was an opportunity there to buy a little small business out, and a couple of mates backed me, and we bought four and a half helicopters pretty much.

yep um and then took that on and we basically just ramped it up there's a big opportunity in wa at that point and um uh built that from four and a half to i think we got to 24 26 machines maybe i can't remember at the peak of it you know and we're still around at 18 20 most of the time now um

once we like in wa that was predominantly mastering work which is what we want to do and what we love doing but then when we had a big flood in wa and lost our house lost everything we owned basically except for um swag and a bag that we flew out of the house before it went underwater

holy got all our machines out of there uh didn't lose any helicopters out of it but everything with my wife jamie and i own just they're gone just come from nowhere pirate just hit man it was a one and they called it a one and two hundred year flooded now they worked that out but it was um the river busted us banks at fitzroy's we had a block on the river yeah and um in three hours it'd come up three meters like a meter an hour so we had no like we were literally it was christmas time so we had no pilots there to help us just

Luckily, my brother was there helping us.

He could fly, so we were flying all the helicopters out before they went underwater.

And we literally just flew out of there with what we could put on our backs.

And that was sort of a bit of a kick in the ass to look for.

what do we rebuild here or what do we do but um my wife and i always knew like here in darwin was where we wanted to come back to right there's just so much opportunity here and we'd already bought our block here in darwin about three or four years prior to that so the sort of do we rebuild in wa or do we move to territory and build theirs we had no house enough and we were literally homeless for a bit so as i will

bucket we'll build here and we built our home here about the same time that we got in touch we got put in touch with you guys and yeah um so pretty well uh kept the wa business running with mastering and then um started this one here we didn't want to step on toes by pinching work and that off people so tourism's no one's work so

I'd never done it and we sort of give it a crack.

At the time, a really good friend of ours, Matty Wright, everyone know about him, you know, on the headlines, believe what you want, but a very, very good operator.

He just got sort of shafted in every which wrong way.

So we sort of took on his flying to help him out because he obviously had a few machines going with that sort of stuff.

uh we took that on and just started branching into to what we do a few guys you know like with the the scenic flies the heli fishing and all that sort of thing um and it grew really quickly yeah um we didn't really know what was going to happen there

So we started out with, like, two 44s when we moved to Territory.

Now we've got the 5 and the Longy, Long Ranger.

Yeah, yeah.

Got some balls to the Longy.

Oh, it's a demon, isn't it?