Looks fun! Every county needs a team like that

Very effective

Anyone know the hourly rate for this type of hunt?

I want to try that.

I am sure it depends some on where you go , but HeliBacon is 3900 for 2 people for 2 hours https://www.helibacon.com/helibacon-pricing/

Coyotes with a helo, about 500$ hour

Three shooters per bird is doable? Seems reasonable for a solid hour.

I see the third guy adds $1295 to the total and rotates out with the observer. Might as well keep it to two.

pay to kill an animal that landowners will pay to have removed? no wonder fur is so cheap. furriers see whats going on with hunters and are working the same goal. getting trappers to pay to trap and make money off both ends

While I won't argue effectiveness, any dead pig by any means is effective, I would be interested in crunching the numbers. Just how much $$$ per hog killed vs other methods would interest me.
Reality in the real world is that $$$ matters and I just don't see this method as an option everywhere.

Cool but Expensive

Effective but not economically efficient. I suspect gang snaring those small treeline areas would produce results just as good as shooting over a longer time period and at much lower cost.

wet helicopter time is 600-1000 dollars an hour with a pilot or more depending on the place so that is a lot of the cost.

is it economical? it is if you think that the land owner pays nothing , the person is paying for an experience you just can't get much of anywhere else , they could go blow that money in Vegas.

cost per animal isn't really the breakdown , turning a problem into a profit is more like it , clearly the crew and staff of the company could as or more effectively kill the hogs but the funding model wouldn't work.

snaring or trapping could be very effective and could be lower in cost per animal and as effective but even at a lower cost who is going to pay for it?

are there people who would be willing to run a snare line and traps sure , but they probably can't do it as a self funding career and there is a lot of land to cover , it seems this is only a viable way to hunt a few months of the year while fields are plowed or dormant , and the tall crops can't hide the pigs.

I wonder how do they go gather up the hogs , would seem a second helicopter would make the most sense , something bigger but that would also get very expensive.

sort of surprised the TX national guard hasn't taken to using this as training , could be good training for pilots and crews , run a gun crew and clean up crews . the gun crew gets moving targets and the clean up crew practice medivacing 200# pigs to a processing plant or refrigerated trailer

new constantly moving gps tagged LZ every few minutes radio coms coordinating , could be useful.

They don't gather the hogs here just leave them to rot every where. But if I throw out a coyote carcass I can get a 250 dollar fine.

The funding is the issue. Dupe some wannabes into spending big money for a thrill "hunt" may work but for how long? Plus how may of those high rollers have the skills?
I've spoken to a georgia pig pro here who uses a similar funding model for night hunting as a clean up after trapping. His comments, and his online videos support it, is that the "dudes" most times are lucky enough to hit the broad side of a barn and that it's his professional "guides" doing the most killing.

I'm in no way opposed to this method, aerial gunning, and if both financially and results oriented effective should be used where ever possible. It's just that I, as one familiar with the problem, am not impressed enough to think it's much more than a high flying but mostly impractical tool over most of the areas where pigs are a problem.
For instance I can think of three or four areas it won't work. Our southern swamps and river bottoms are heavily wooded with the closest thing to triple canopy this side of the Amazon. In vast areas above these bottoms the landscape is a vast monoculture of planted pine in various stages of regenration. Flights may work in the first two seasons following clearcut and replant on large tracts (small tracts not so much) but from year three to ten plus it's total closed canopy and will remain mostly so through various thinning until final cut some twenty to thirty years later. Pigs in the southern mountaint live under forest cover combined with terrain that makes nap of the earth flight suicidal. Then there's the ever growing problem of feral swine in the urban landscape. Believe it or not but there are pigs inside the city limits of almost all of Georgia's major cities, including Atlanta, and I'm sure Florida and other states.
JMO, but the best looking tool on the horizon is going to be the toxicants currently being tested. There are still many issues to be worked out but if they do it's game on.

The AGFC has recently hired a company to do this on some of our WMAs.

There are several cheaper outfits out there.

Cheaper and rotary wing aircraft doesn't instill me with confidence.

Fixed wing would be cheaper but not as maneuverable. The danger isn't the platform but the pilot. Target fixation gets a few every year