Editor’s Note: The following article is a piece of satire and not intended to be taken as fact. All quotations are fictitious.
In a bold and surprising move, the Connecticut College Board of Trustees allocated funds to purchase a helicopter last Thursday. The Board approved $2.5 million for a double-rotor Robinson helicopter, a pilot and a helipad to be placed on the roof of Charles E. Shain library.
“We have decided to purchase the helicopter for a variety of reasons. First of all, it makes us the first private college in history to own one. Second, it will allow us to take prospective students on an aerial tour of our scenic campus,” reported Young Alumni Trustee Harris Rosenheim.
He added that the decision was made “not because it was easy, but because it was hard.”
The Board conceived the idea after the massive success of the YouTube sensation “Aerial Tour of Connecticut College.” In the video, a camera mounted to a helicopter provides a stunning aerial view of the campus and surrounding area with poignant text running at the bottom. Since the video, applications have risen 23 percent over last years’ numbers and the Admissions Office has noted that the video is on every prospie’s lips as he/she comes to interview.
When asked for a comment, President Higdon responded, “if we spent a quarter of a million on two logos, I think we can spend ten times that on a helicopter. Right?”
Students have also been pleasantly surprised.
“I think the Aerial Tour video just whet everyone’s appetite. It’s time we got ourselves a real chopper,” said a freshman who asked not to be named. He added, “if Middlebury gets a boat — a yacht for Christ’s sake — and Wesleyan gets a single-engine Cessna, I think we deserve something too.”
The primary purpose of the helicopter is to provide aerial tours of the college in ideal weather.
An added benefit is that the copter will come equipped with an AED device and medical supplies so that we no longer have to depend on ambulances to haul our drunken classmates to L&M Hospital.
The only concern the Board had was that the helicopter might prove to be a noise violation to the surrounding area. In a proposal, Robinson Helicopters claimed to have a copter that could operate at fewer than 83 decibels (about as loud as busy city traffic). Coincidentally, this is the maximum level of sustained noise allowed in the New London municipality.
Safety was also an issue, but it ceased to logjam the measure because of a “pretty solid insurance policy,” according to Rosenheim.
The copter is scheduled to be debuted at the 2010 Commencement, with the yet-to-be-decided speaker arriving in it immediately before his or her speech on Tempel Green.
The copter will proudly display Connecticut College’s new athletics logo on each door, and will be painted royal blue and white.
Not to pretend like I have any real world experience with anything business related, but I must make myself heard on this issue, and I hope I’m not too late.
I’m willing to guess that the cost of maintaining, fueling, and paying the pilot to fly this helicopter, will be anywhere from $2000 to $3000 per flight hour. Some light googling confirms my estimate (but I think I’m very charitable in estimating, that my guess is a low one).
So let’s assume it costs $2500 for each hour of flight. The bulk of the work that the copter does, and therefore the bulk of the fuel it burns, is done during take off, and landing (I think), so I think it’s fair to assume that we estimate an hour of cost for each flight.
ok so [$2500]*[# flights per day]*[# days of operation, presumably 5: M T W R F], I presume you will not be running it in the winter as the trees will be bare, so scrap 1/4 from the 260 weekdays in the year, and you have: $2500*[say 8 flights per day]*[195 days of the year] = $4 million, yes that is FOUR MILLION DOLLARS!!!!
What are you going to do if the pilot is intoxicated one day? Do you think that a parent and their child desperately trying to impress their way into our institution will actually stop to consider that their life might be in danger when they perceive the pilot to be behaving a bit oddly?
Of course not. The only thing on their minds is 1) how do I make all these people think I’m a mature adult, fit for a school (not an aerial view of a campus) such as this? or 2) God I hope my kid doesn’t screw this up. If the copter crashes and somebody dies, I don’t even want to predict the financial, structural, psychological, and (since this is conn) ecological damage you will incur.
Beyond that though, I think that as a marketing ploy this idea, no offense, is nuts! unless you can seat 12 people at a time you will be taking on one prospective applicant (and their family) at a time. Or worse, if you just take the kids on the tour (and why would you do that, you’re primary objective as a salesman is really want to wow the parents, the ones with the money), and something happens, rather than all of them dying at once (problem solved right?) you have 3 very angry childless couples, intelligent enough to have sufficient funds meriting the treatment of a complimentary $3000 helicopter ride, on your hands. “Lawsuit” is to “that” as “fire” is to “gunpowder.” Oh yeah they got rid of that on the SAT didn’t they, my bad.
On the issue of why people have been talking about the aerial video and why there are so many views, I think that could easily be explained by the fact that more and more people are worried about their futures (“where professors care about your future” a line from the video subliminally creates a conn halo effect, as does the soundtrack that sounds like it was taken from the PBS series Planet Earth, is that the title? idk), and by the fact that as an institution with criteria for admission, the first intuitive step towards remedying the problem of “How will I ever get into this school?” is, like all other problems, to look for a magic pill or solution. Meaning they (or rather, the mom’s who read about Conn in Colleges That Change Lives) will do their research. The video, by virtue of being a video commercial with all the tools of branding at its aid, is more memorable than the website, or the brochures, etc.
Back to the copter though, unless you got a military grade Apache helicopter that could seat 20 or more people, this is simply an inefficient, if not WASTEFUL thing to do.
On a personal level I don’t want distracted from my work -or whatever, college is about finding yourself or something right?- by a loud helicopter flying over head, it bugs me enough when the coast guard flys over us.
While I agree that marketing is the greatest source of leverage in any business (not that we are a business, are we?), I do not think that this is a good way to proceed. Unless your target market are people who live on Palm Island, you are going to come off as Holier than thou, and immediately beg of the parents the following question, “Just how much is this going to cost?”
At that point you’ve created hesitation, and a disconnect between you and your prospect. Persuasion 101, don’t break the train of thought. They already want to come here, by reputation alone. It’s overkill.
And what I want to know is, “Just how much is it going to cost [me, a sophomore with 2 more years of tuition hikes for expansionist policies]?”
please see the disclaimer (the first sentence of the article).