Semper Fly Helicopters

09/06/2026

Five MD Helicopters training opportunities. 🚁🔧

MD Helicopters is offering FIVE scholarships at their headquarters in Mesa, Arizona:

🚁 1 MD500 Flight Training Scholarship
A five-day MD500 training program including academic training and 5 hours of flight time.
Value: $12,902

🔧 4 500 Series Maintenance Training Scholarships
Two-week specialized 500 Series Maintenance Training Courses.
Value: $4,915 each

Five opportunities. One incredible aviation company.

Sponsored by MD Helicopters MD Helicopters

09/05/2026

09/04/2026

What is Semper Fly doing?! Keep watching!!!

09/03/2026

From living in a borrowed horse trailer to the pages of NBAA’s Business Aviation Insider.

That sentence alone is hard for me to wrap my head around.

Our Semper Fly story is officially published, and seeing everything we have built laid out like this hits differently.

A few years ago, there was no roadmap for any of this. There was an idea, a helicopter, a lot of stubborn determination, and Mike and me believing we could build something the helicopter industry needed.

Today, Semper Fly is partnered with the University of Oklahoma, fully Part 141 approved, VA approved, a Bell Certified Training Facility, an FBI training contractor, a training provider for law enforcement pilots, and home to a growing group of students who are turning their love of helicopters into real careers.

Those accomplishments mean a lot.

But the pipeline we are building means more.

Watching Soami come through the OU program, earn her CFI and then become our first OU student hired to teach the students coming behind her is exactly what this was supposed to become.

A pathway.

Not just to a certificate or a rating, but to a career and a place in this industry.

This article also tells parts of my story that are much more personal. The Marine Corps. Starting over. The uncertainty. Living in a borrowed horse trailer with everything I owned in storage and trying to figure out what came next.

I certainly didn’t know that road would eventually lead here.

Mike has been beside me building Semper Fly from the beginning, and there simply isn’t a Semper Fly story without him. The same goes for the incredible instructors, students, partners and people who believed in this vision before there was much proof that it would work.

I’m incredibly proud of what we have built, but I’m even more excited about what comes next.

Thank you to NBAA and Lowen Baumgarten for taking the time to tell our story, and Morgan Anderson Photography for capturing it so beautifully.

This is a pretty special milestone for our little helicopter company in Oklahoma. ❤️🚁

And we are nowhere near finished.

Standards. Skill. Flight Training.

Meet Brandi Rector, co-founder of the first female Marine veteran-owned helicopter school in the country.