BEA Helicopters occupies a unique and pioneering place in British aviation history — the story of a national airline that dared to believe, earlier than almost anyone else, that the helicopter could be a serious commercial proposition. The roots of the organisation stretch back further than many realise. Starting in 1947, British European Airways operated a Helicopter Experiment Unit with a fleet of five helicopters sourced from the United States — three Sikorsky S-51s and two Bell 47s. The unit operated timetabled mail services in East Anglia during 1948, and a scheduled passenger service between Cardiff, Wrexham and Liverpool in 1950. Further innovation followed in June 1951 with a helicopter link between Northolt, Birmingham and London Heathrow — services that were genuinely novel, genuinely ambitious, and genuinely ahead of their time. Moving into the 1950s, the Bristol Type 171 Sycamore also began to feature on services in the Midlands and southern England, adding a British-built machine to what had been an exclusively American fleet. A separate company was formally constituted in 1964 as BEA Helicopters Limited, and on 1 May 1964 it operated the first scheduled service between Penzance and the Isles of Scilly with a Sikorsky S-61 — simultaneously replacing the last biplane scheduled service in the United Kingdom and beginning what would become one of the longest-running scheduled helicopter routes in the world. The company expanded into offshore oil and gas support flights from July 1965, from an operating base at Beccles Airfield in Suffolk, with operations from Aberdeen starting in July 1967 and from Sumburgh in 1971 — making BEA Helicopters a crucial early player in the infrastructure of the North Sea oil industry at the very moment it was coming into being. The company was also involved in setting up the Airlink high-frequency helicopter shuttle service between Gatwick and Heathrow in 1978, another bold attempt to weave the helicopter into the fabric of everyday British travel. With the merger of BEA and BOAC to form British Airways on 31 March 1974, the helicopter division was renamed British Airways Helicopters, but the spirit and ambition that had driven it since those early experimental days with the S-51 in East Anglia remained intact. From mail runs over Norfolk to North Sea oil platforms, from Cornish clifftops to Heathrow, BEA Helicopters wrote a chapter in British aviation history that deserves to be far better known than it is.