What should you know before a doors-off NYC helicopter ride? — featuring Exploring with Courtney (FlyNYON)

0:00 hi everyone welcome or welcome back to my channel today's video is all about the five things you must know before booking a flight with flying ion including some very unfortunate mistakes that I made that you can easily avoid but before we get started talking about the five things that you must know let's

0:20 quickly look at what you can expect from The Experience overall if you want an exciting and unique way to explore New York a helicopter tour could be just the activity flying ion is a jersey-based company that offers tours flying over New York City based on my own research fly nion seemed to have the most

0:38 affordable options compared to its competitors and it's definitely most famous for its doors off experience which is the one we'll be talking about today the office was very comfortable and you're supposed to get there an hour and 15 minutes before your tour while you're there you'll watch a safety

0:54 video and then lock up your belongings before getting harnessed up and driven to the helicopters so without further Ado let's get into the five tips that I have for you but really quickly before we do be sure to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel and by the way

1:17 tips three four and five are the ones that I messed up on so if you want to be sure to not make my same mistakes be sure that you watch all the way to the end of the video but my first big tip for you is to make sure you buy your ticket at the right time you basically fly nion when you go on their website

1:36 you'll see that they're pretty much always having some sort of a sale so I've noticed that it's about every two days they'll have a new sale that lasts for two days and it's typically ranged from about 40 percent off fifty percent off or 70 percent off of all the flight options so of course my advice to you is

1:56 going to be wait until you can find that 70 off deal it shouldn't take you more than a few days so just be patient and you can say really big when you're buying your tickets my second tip also has to do with waiting so when you are booking your flight on the website you'll see two

2:16 different options you can do a 15-minute flight and a 30 minute flight the 15-minute flight takes you around the southern tip of Manhattan so you'll see the financial district and the Statue of Liberty and a few other places in that area and the 30-minute flight shows you all of that but then also all the way up

2:35 until Central Park so it definitely covers a lot more ground if you're on the fence of which duration to pick which I was myself here is my advice to you I would say book The 15-minute Flight online and then when you go to the office in New Jersey they'll try to upsell you and convince you to pay a

2:54 little bit more to do the 30 minute flight so for example when we went they offered us to upgrade to the 30-minute flight for just 90 extra dollars per person and if we had bought the 30 minute flight when we booked our tickets online line we would have been spending an extra hundred and ten dollars per

3:12 person so waiting until we got to the office and letting them upsell us is definitely a good deal for us and that's what I would recommend so as I said these last three tips are the big ones where I made a mistake and I hope that you can take my advice and have a better experience than I did so the first one

3:29 is to wait until you can go during some warm weather so basically that just means the spring or the summer time my friend and I went in October so it was a pretty chilly time of year and when you're up in the air with the doors off it's significantly colder than it is when you're on the ground and so because

3:49 of that we had to wear layers and even winter coats to stay warm enough this was kind of a pain because the seats on the helicopter are so tight that you're already really squished together and then when you add all of these layers on top of it it can be really restrictive and just not that comfortable and in

4:08 addition to all of the layers that you're wearing you're also wearing a seat belt a safety harness an inflatable life vest just in case the camera strap that's around your neck and the phone strap that's hanging from your neck so there's just a lot of stuff on you and if you don't have to be wearing a winter

4:26 coat it would be a much more comfortable experience tip number four is based off of my most painful mistake so this is probably the best piece of advice I could give you overall and that would be don't be afraid to pay for the seat upgrade so once again when you are checking out on the website you have the

4:44 option of paying extra to guarantee that you have a window seat and this is so you can be sure that you're able to take a shoe selfie when you're in the air and so if you don't pay to ensure that you have one of the edge seats they will just assign your seat when you get there based on the weight distribution of the

5:03 plane so when we were boarding the helicopter my name is called for the middle seat and it was really squished and tight and I was having a really hard time having a clear line of sight when we were actually up in the air because I was trying to look past people in both directions and people's arms and phones

5:23 and cameras were kind of blocking the view so in addition to being squished in the middle and having obstructed views of the city I was unable to take any shoe selfies and there was just overall less of a sense of thrill and Adventure that I was looking for if you are like me at all then the reason that you

5:43 wanted to go on a doors off helicopter ride was for the thrill and the extra dose of excitement and fear when you can look out and see the city hundreds and hundreds of feet below you and it just really gets your adrenaline pumping I did not have that experience in the middle seat and that was probably the

6:01 most disappointing part of the entire experience but you can avoid this potential disappointment by making sure that you get a win seat and paying that upgrade in advance I know that it's expensive but if you think about it you're already paying a substantial amount of money and spending a good

6:17 chunk of your day doing this so you want to make sure that you have the best experience possible and if that means spending a little bit more to guarantee that you're going to get the best seat I would recommend doing that my fifth and final tip for you is to make sure you bring a camera stabilizer if you're

6:34 bringing more than just your phone so if you bring an extra camera like I did you're going to want to make sure you have a stabilizer or that you know how to change the shutter speed on the Fly pun intended and that is because especially if you take my advice that I just gave you and you make sure that

6:52 you're sitting on a window seat it is going to be so so windy that your hands are going to be shaking and you're not going to get steady footage so I brought my camera and even though I was in the middle seat it was still really shaky and I can barely use any of the footage that I I got you can see just how shaky

7:10 it looks so if you are going to bring your camera just make sure you have a gimbal that's attached to it or some way to make sure that you can get a steady grip on it because otherwise it might kind of just be a waste and you're already holding on to so many different things while you're strapped in there

7:25 you don't need one extra thing if it's not really going to benefit you in the long run so there you have it those are my five tips for you to know before you book a flight with flying nylon I hope this video was informative and helpful for you if it was please give it a thumbs up and be sure to subscribe to my

7:44 channel this really helps me out and I'm so curious to know if you've ever been in a helicopter and if so what was your experience I would love to read all about it in the comments so let me know but other than that thank you so much for watching and I will see you in my next video

8:00 bye