PHIL JARRATT meets a bloke whose Noosa company is now aiming for the sky he once plummeted from.
Many people can point to a defining moment in their lives, and in Jason Schellaar’s case surviving a helicopter crash would certainly be one, but in fact he can point to three. And given the course his life has followed, it’s not surprising that two of them involve fire and two involve helicopters.
The son of Dutch immigrants, Jason was born and raised in Noble Park in the Melbourne suburbs, where his father, a video technician at the ABC, also established several successful businesses, including a 54,000-chicken farm, enabling the family to sell up in 1987 and move to Noosa, where they bought the Sunshine River Boats company. Jason, just out of school, apprenticed as a marine mechanic and spent the next decade working in the field at home and abroad before experiencing the first of his defining moments.
He had established his own marine company on the Gold Coast, but 18 months into the venture a fire in an adjacent plastics factory went through his premises and destroyed everything. “I took it as a sign,” he recalls. “I needed a complete change of direction, and I’d always had this mad love of helicopters.”
So began six years of cutting his teeth at aerial fire fighting at McDermott Aviation in Cooroy. Jason recalls: “I got my flying experience and also learnt about operations, doing everything from mosquito spraying to forestry work and we also started building up aerial response fire-fighting equipment. That’s where I began to get a real feel for the industry.”
The early 2000s was a time of great advancement in aerial firefighting, and few companies were better positioned to take advantage of this than McDermott Aviation, by then the biggest firefighting fleet in the country. Says Jason: “Tanks and buckets were being developed all over the place. But I had an idea starting to form and I started thinking I might have to go it alone.”
Helitak set up shop in the double garage of the Schellaars family home at Peregian Springs in 2007 with one very big idea. Says Jason: “The idea was to develop a retractable tank and make it as light as possible with maximum capacity and the most efficient drop. They are the key points. Our tanks can maintain the centre of gravity in the middle whereas most others, when you’re filling up the nose goes down and you’ve got problems with manoeuvrability.”
Helitak soon made its first sale (“for $40,000 – not enough, but enough to fund the next one”) but that was the beginning of a decade of struggle. Jason’s parents bought acreage at Doonan so he moved operations to a shed on the property, Bobby Tomlinson, Helitak’s longest-serving employee, joined to work on the design drawings, but the company only existed from sale to sale, and there weren’t enough of them. Says Jason: “When you’re developing something from scratch, you’ve got to keep rebuilding it and improving it, and you have to get the hours up. Once you’ve got tanks that have been performing for multiple hours, the market starts to take notice.”
Jason and his Helitak design also won a series of the ABC’s New Inventors program and also took out the People’s Choice Award and the month spent with researchers and mentors ahead of the program gave Jason new insights into his mission.
There were times when Jason, battling to find development funds, almost walked away from Helitak, but the dream had a bigger hold on him than that. By 2017, when Paul Blundell joined him to run operations and production, and they moved the company into rented space in the Noosaville industrial estate, international orders were starting to flow, Helitak received recognition via both State and Federal funding and support and they had built an enthusiastic team working on the tanks, pumps and other products.
Then came the third defining moment. Last spring Helitak had an American pilot in town testing the equipment for FAA certification approvals. On the way back from a test flight north of Cooroy, the pilot and John McDermott noticed smoke in the Peregian forests. After contacting the Rural Fire Service and hooking up a tank for its maiden flight, the new McDermott Bell 214ST with the Helitak FT3500 fire tank was above a fire-front now growing in intensity by the second.
Says Jason: “The Peregian fire was an emotional day for all of us. There were five helicopters working that day and I told my team to down tools and took them there so that they could see the difference between what our outfit was doing compared to the others, and they all understood what we’re trying to achieve at Helitak. No one else could drop the water as effectively as our tank and I think the FT3500 made the difference that day. The fire wasn’t getting any smaller and it was heading for Weyba Downs with Noosa next – and the tank dropped the ‘money shot’ on an area of fire that had jumped the highway, stopping it in its tracks. A lot of people saw the video on various news channels that night and realised what a difference a good intense drop can make. That’s what we’re good at.”
While Covid-19 shot a hole in their plans for delivery of a multi-unit contract for the current California fire season, Helitak’s team of 14 (including Jason’s son Riley, 18) is working at maximum capacity to meet orders. With prices now ranging from $160,000 up to $900,000, and a client list in Australia, New Zealand, United States and Europe, Helitak expects to produce more than 100 retractable tank systems (including their computerised in-cabin program controller) over the next five years.
Jason Schellaars, who runs his business with the enthusiasm and passion of a football coach, says they might soon be in the market for a bigger shed.
