Six weeks ago, the P-T’s Joe Segura reported the closure of a Long Beach helicopter school that stranded 150 students. The bankruptcy crash-landing of Silver State Helicopters (I clicked on the company’s website, but damn if I could open it) made headlines in Nevada (where the company is based), but it was also national news (here’s the NY Times piece). That’s because Jerry Airola, the company’s high- (now low-) flying owner, owned a multi-million-dollar chain of schools in several U.S. cities and bought lots and lots of toys with the profits–and then reportedly left the business world owing lots of money. Orix, his Dallas financial backer, loaned Airola $40 million, with helicopters as collateral; today, the copters are missing, and Orix is trying to track down Airola for more info (here’s Orix’s legal request for a confab with Airola. (When an Orix employee went looking for the copters at the company’s Vegas hangar, he was reportedly met by a guy with a gun.) Some reports have Airola fleeing for the Caribbean. And regular, non-Orix people are pissed: the Wikipedia entry on his BK filing last month is relatively mild–”relatively” when you compare it with comments from people who call themselves former students; one of them called Silver State “a Ponzi scheme.”

Tags: airola, bankruptcy, blackhawk down, District Weekly, helicopters, Las Vegas, Long Beach, school, silver state